Category: Sculpture

There is always pleasure in looking. Things catch our eye. They lure us in and awaken memory, and in turn arouse desire. Looking at art is not just an exercise of intellect and imagination but it also activates our sense of embodiment, our connection with other physical things. This is especially so with works of sculpture that intersect with social spaces marked by human habitation and meaning. Sculpture has a long social history in providing gestures of past grandeur, markers of civic pride and powerful emblems of future hope. In more recent times, sculpture has activated the realm of both architecture and landscape to shape and understand the human imagination as embedded in the natural environment. Such artistic gestures help us touch the world through our eyes and grasp a sense of belonging in the world we inhabit. 

Braddon Snape’s work demonstrates a knowing confidence in dealing with the tradition of an artist working in three dimensions. In his case, it involves a somewhat gruelling physical and mental rigour in turning materials into things that resonate in our visual imagination. Since 2014, Snape has been working with a unique approach involving the welding of steel sheets together and inflating them into a variety of forms with compressed air. These works literally express the process of inspiration, with the breath of a pneumatic pump giving them a unique presence and personality. Imitating puffed-up pillows, paper bags, wine bladders, that are leaned, strung, and manipulated in ways that work against the expectations of minimalist sculpture to be true to form and materials, these works are poetic, inferential, and incite the peripheral imagination. 

Working with these same materials, this new body of work provides an exciting if not visually exhilarating turn. The liquid and refractive surfaces of these new works serves to blur and destabilise their orientation towards the viewer. They seem to be literally unzipping the firm signs of their manufacture as steel sheets and appear to be spilling out into the surrounding space articulating both the light and the air. Not just mirrors, but a transformation of the movement of air and light particles into a liquid dance. This is like a moment of rapture, or even rupture, where things that have been held in, come spilling out in an ecstatic release. Breathing bodies understand such states as the rhythm of expiration and inspiration, the slow release of breath. It is the state also of wonder, where clear boundaries are transcended, not as an idea, but as a felt sense of delight! 

There is great pleasure, mixed with a measure of anxiety, in looking at these works. I want to measure, categorise, establish boundaries, define understanding, while all the time the work is moving in the other direction, spilling out in excess. And then I remember what it is like to hover in the in-between spaces of existence, like hovering on a threshold or on the brink of a discovery. It is the fluid space of negotiating the collapse of edges, and the rush and ecstatic joy of letting go and finding release. Here, I want to reach for the geographies of the spiritual to explain this moment of ecstatic potential; the empty space between the fingers of Michelangelo’s God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or the tension of edge and centre in the shining white stone of a Zen Garden, or the stark light and dark shadow on a walk around the water-worn edges of Uluru. In these works, boundaries are let loose, no longer seeking definition, but allowing for the excess of freedom and visual ecstasy. 

Art has long carried this alchemical impulse to apprehend moments of transformation and change, like observing the moment when ice turns into water, and then setting out to turn lead into gold. The dance of particles that surround the liquid surfaces of these mirrored steel pieces allow for such imagining. Surface and depth merge, inside turns out, and the proper boundaries of definition and classification are left aside for the liquid transformations where art spills out into life. 

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ROD PATTENDEN IS AN ARTIST, ART HISTORIAN, AND THEOLOGIAN INTERESTED IN THE POWER OF IMAGES. HE LIVES AND WORKS ON AWABAKAL LAND.

Those entering the Royal Hobart Hospital each day do so with a variety of reasons that range from the mundane to the more pressing issues of life or death. It is an entranceway marked by fear and anxiety, as well as by compassion, kindness, and love. Perched high above these anxious concerns in the vast space of the atrium are seven large nets containing what seem like bubbles or spherical glass balls, floating as if on an invisible sea or cloud of air. This installation is the work of glass artist Keith Dougall, who has worked with hundreds of staff, patients, and a team of technical assistants to create a work – Catching Your Breath – that invites an instant sense of compassion and empathy. Installed in 2020, this public art project engages the viewer with a profound sense of delight and playfulness. Set within this vast entry lobby, its clear sense of wonder is enough to take your breath away.

The work has an immediate impact and lifts the eyes of the viewer up into the space to consider its construction and to foster curiosity about its meaning. Dougall is an experienced glass artist with a considerable body of work, from individual art glass pieces to major public commissions. As a glass blower who uses his own breath to form work out of molten glass, he has extended his practice to incorporate the breath of others as the basic metaphor explored by this work. When each glass bubble was formed in the studio, they were provided with a small entry hole, where later, patients, family members, and staff were invited to supply their own breath, when the work was then finally sealed up. The overall installation consists of containers for this gift of life, inspiring, expiring, in the rhythm of life-giving breath.

The artist explains: ‘The work symbolises the fragility and resilience of breath and life. The suspension of the work is a metaphor for the support and care that staff and family provide the patient, lifting them up in their time of need’. Behind the stunning presentation of the work high above the heads of those who enter the hospital lies a complex process of manufacture and preparation that amplifies the work’s achievement as a community arts project. As people filled each vessel with their breath, many of their stories were recorded on video and became part of the documentation of the work through a dedicated website. One, therefore, takes in the work and the history of its formation as a part of a whole process based in compassion and understanding that gives life to people. Here is a representation of the nets of connection that surround individuals as they come into the hospital environment, where every breath, and every heartbeat, is closely monitored.

The breath of life is a metaphor strongly present in the Christian tradition. We remember that God forms creation through the agency of breath, and in turn breathes life into the clay of creatures, including the creation of human beings. This fundamental connection was clearly in the mind of the artist who works each day breathing life into inert glass forms that became vessels of delicate fragility and profound beauty. Perhaps this is the role some artists are energised by, through breathing life into material things, through imagination and transformation remaking the world into a habitation for wonder and human kindness. This work is one of embodied spirituality and community connection that successfully celebrates the role of a health care institution and the fundamental human values of love and compassion that lie at the heart of all healing and wholeness.

[A version of this piece appeared in Artway.]

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ROD PATTENDEN IS AN ARTIST, ART HISTORIAN, AND THEOLOGIAN INTERESTED IN THE POWER OF IMAGES. HE LIVES AND WORKS ON AWABAKAL LAND.

Awakenings IV premiered for Artweek Auckland 2020 at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell Auckland. It is an installation artwork that offers an immediate and potentially sustained encounter. A large levitating partially concealed object of uncertain substance is illuminated in a field of white and gold coloured light. It speaks of the unknowable and unfathomable spiritual mystery and beauty of natural phenomena, and acts as a threshold into the terrain of the numinous. The concept of the numinous speaks to the realms of our experience which cannot be quantified, explained, or contained – our intuition, and our feeling-states; our connection to the cosmos, and, for some, a sense of the divine. I am interested in the intersection of art with spiritual experience, and aspire to create installations that activate spaces for audiences that offer a possible awakening to wonder. This exhibition aims to explore relationships between abstraction, colour, light, and space, contributing to the conversations around the connections between abstraction and spiritual experience.

The circle is the primary geometric symbol in this work and relates to sacred geometries which have long and rich histories dating back to 2000–1001 BCE in Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. The circle or sphere is a universal symbol with extensive meaning. It represents the notions of totality, wholeness, original perfection, the Self, the infinite, eternity, timelessness, life, and all cyclic movement. Sacred geometries, termed by Galileo ‘the language of the universe’, are trans-cultural existing in nature, architectural structures (in particular sites of worship) and art. The music of the spheres, harmonics, and music are related to the planets and their distance from one another and the sun. The sphere can evoke the heavens. The veiling of the sphere references the shroud, the veil between the seen and unseen realms, between the heavens and the earth.

Awakenings IV, 2020. Installation from custom pvc sphere, helium, air, organza mesh, light, 2 x 2 x 6 m. Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand. 

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Karen Sewell is a visual artist who lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Sewell graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2016 from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. She is interested in the intersection of art with spiritual experience and aspires to create artworks that activate spaces for participants to be able to experience liminal moments of awareness of the unseen and unknown. Sewell works across multiple media specialising in installation practice. Her work has been selected for multiple awards, winning The Trusts Award in 2011 and is represented in private collections including The James Wallace Arts Trust. Sewell has exhibited work across New Zealand with a highlight being Awakenings IV at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in October 2020. Her work is represented in private collections including The James Wallace Arts Trust. In addition to her creative practice, Sewell founded The Bonfire and now facilitates this national artist network. The aims of The Bonfire are to assist and support the thriving of other artists, through online blog posts and face to face regular meet-ups involving workshops, retreats and events.

The very material of this ‘Pocket Bible’ serves to provide an initial punchline for this work. It makes a direct connection between the felt texture of the sacred book in our hands and the polished familiarity of a wallet. It provides an unexpected and visceral connection between what we hold to be sacred and secular, and in a direct manner the kind of power we might hold in our hands. It’s also a male thing. It exposes the fetishlike manner in which men hold their wealth and social power through this often-beaten, sweat-ridden carrier accessing wealth, identity, membership, community, affections, and allegiances. I have to confess it makes me aware of the nervous fondling that goes on each day as I check for its place in my pocket. It is a constant devotion to this container of my social power. Lose your wallet you lose your life!

While this work has clear and initial visual impact, it also burrows down into essential questions about allegiances and affections that tell us who we are, and who we are becoming. These are the indications about what drives us, particularly for men, driven in some cultures to focus on success and social status. In contrast to the slim wallet containing the essential operational tools of identity for men, the seemingly bottomless mystery of handbags offers far more resourcefulness, providing anything from a first aid kit to a handy tool for fixing any household problem. In some cultures male power is found through individuality, while female identity is often expressed through collaboration, finding friends. Such generalizations based on gender roles are under rapid change as individuals attach themselves to smartphones with the promise of far greater control over their sense of self. History now becomes personal as individuals mark their progress through photographs documenting every fashion ensemble, every meal, and every cute dog they encounter on this journey towards an always beautiful future.

The artist, Paul Roorda, expresses well the multiple implications of this work. He comments:

How do we identify ourselves? By our religion, our citizenship, gender, etc., or by our financial status and power in the marketplace? At what point does the church become over-involved in financial matters? Do the tables need to be turned over once again? Or can sacred and profane identities, powers, and institutions live happily bound together?’

Money, power, and devotion have long been a challenge for religious institutions who seek to provide the tools to find freedom and yet require allegiance and financial support. The visual questions posed by this tender wallet of devotion leaves the viewer with the questions that need to be held without easy resolution, so that freedom might be maintained and that humans do not become slaves to their deeply loved idols. An understanding of money is found most clearly when in the company of a sense of gratefulness, rather than through any consideration of power or control.

The binding together of the operational means of identity, such as credit cards, memberships, and driver’s license, with the holy pages of Scripture, provides an object that exposes the anxious questions that arise in trying to straddle the realities of these two very different worlds. What belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar, is an age-old question that is never finally resolved. This work serves to hold open such anxiety as an ongoing question about where our affections really lie. It invites us to acknowledge the tension between living in the world and living by the words of Jesus. It invites us to lay open an awareness of the seductions that are present through living in a consumer society, and the manner in which our affections and allegiances are always being shaped towards products that need to be purchased. In an age where freedom is heavily marketed, where uniqueness has a cult following, we find ourselves somewhat all alike in our dependence on things sold to us as agents of life. Consumption is not the same thing as living a full life. This work provides a space for potential wisdom in making the better choice.

Reposted from Artway.

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ROD PATTENDEN IS AN ARTIST, ART HISTORIAN, AND THEOLOGIAN INTERESTED IN THE POWER OF IMAGES. HE LIVES AND WORKS ON AWABAKAL LAND.

Paul Roorda is a Canadian artist who transforms found materials to create two-dimensional art, sculptures, and outdoor site-specific installations that examine the relationship between religion, medicine, science, and environmentalism. He has exhibited extensively with solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and Germany and has been awarded grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Paul Roorda was a finalist for the 2016 K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Ontario. He was Artist in Residence for the City of Kitchener, Ontario, in 2007 and at GlogauAIR in Berlin in 2012 and 2015.

It was the flickering sparkle, like diamonds, that caught my eye. An ensemble of delicate jewel-like containers laid out on a small table. Not crystal but salt, and miraculously held together in fragile delicate forms like containers. They held no other function than to set out a table for beauty and light. The light flickered like fire in my eye as I moved around this display and as I drew in close, I held my breath, fearing its moisture laden content would shatter the magic of this fragile salt ensemble. I had been invited to be on the judging panel for Australia’s Blake Prize for Religious Art and this work had caught my full attention. Salt containers, a collection of tears, the spilling over of grief that marks the human journey. Here was an expression of the lament that is so much a part of the human experience and the global world in which we live. So much sadness, violence, and reconciliation, a never-ending cycle. How do we contain and understand such suffering?

Carl Jung has said, ‘The most outstanding properties of salt are bitterness and wisdom … Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.’ This delicate ensemble of salt forms invites the viewer to value and make sacred the experience of tears in grief, as an accepted part of the human journey and therefore a place where God is. Rather than seeking an escape from our suffering and the pain we feel for others who also suffer, here is an honouring of the place of compassion. There is bitterness and also wisdom, and a spirituality that is embodied, earthed and compassionate that does not make us insular but interconnected. Far from being a sign of weakness, tears remind us that the journey of life is undertaken in a leaky boat. We cannot isolate ourselves from the complex and fluid dimensions of life, we float upon such a sea.

Rebekah Pryor is an artist wise to the learning found through ritual and sacred space. This work echoes the complex human experience of grief and wise containment. It is part of a larger project where she is seeking to visualise in particular the experience of the mother. In Christian imagery this is often limited to images of women who are models of obedience and passivity, well robed in blue and silent in their transcendent beauty. This work activates the role of mother to contain not only her own grief but the grief that results from being a nurturer and holding the pain of others. She writes, ‘Saltcellars is a motif of maternal lament. It is part of a larger body of work that seeks to critique traditional images of the mother in Christian religious art and generate new “icons“ that might more fully, ethically represent real maternal experience’. She adds, ‘Saltcellars suggests that bitterness and wisdom exist at once in a woman’s maternal experience. Her body feels both’.

In seeing this work we also feel it in our own body. On the edges of our seeing there are always tears, washing clean our capacity to see what is going on around us. While God might ‘wipe the tears from our eyes’ (Revelation 21.4), I think tears also enable us to see ethically and morally in a world awash with spin, illusion and the seduction of images which try to tell us that we are living in a culture where heaven is now on earth. Instead of this portrayal of a perfect world, tears remind us that the world is a sorry place. It is grief that dissolves the false promises of such cultural tropes. We have not arrived and lament is the prophetic response. This work invites us into a space that looks to me like a sacred space. God the mother sheds tears for this creation and for humans in their habitation of this planet. There is wisdom here that invites a re-orientation to nurture this vulnerable world and to see a God exercising the power of compassion. Life, after all, is worth crying for.

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Rebekah Pryor is a visual artist, curator, and academic living and working on Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri country. Her artistic and research practice is interdisciplinary and currently explores the spatial and iconic potential of the body via a range of media and disciplines, including philosophy of religion, feminist theory, feminist theology, and architecture. Rebekah was a finalist in the 65th Blake Prize in 2018 and currently works in research and teaching in the Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne.

ROD PATTENDEN IS AN ARTIST, ART HISTORIAN, AND THEOLOGIAN INTERESTED IN THE POWER OF IMAGES. HE LIVES AND WORKS ON AWABAKAL LAND.

I am standing on the river flats of the Hunter River at Warkworth (-32.490620,151.028671: paddock reference). It’s a narrow flat valley slashed through with a slow meandering river resting in a deep sinuous trench. The soil under the drought-browned pasture is black. It crumbles easily in my hand. In the distance, there’s a mob of kangaroos grazing on the remaining plant roots. Across the river, there’s an old farmhouse that in times past belonged to a breeder of stock horses. I stayed there once as a guest but the family has long since moved out. Now it belongs to a mine with an overburden wall that rises up like a frozen tidal wave, forever threatening the house and the surrounding river flats.

Here, soil is a commodity. Soil is not as valuable as the coal that lies underneath it if we think in short term economics. But thinking intergenerationally, these black-soiled river flats should be preserved. One day, once again, humans may need them to grow food.

How shall I talk about the absolute importance of soil to human civilisation? Soil, along with air and water, is one of our most fundamental natural resources. Soil grows food for us and earth-others. It grows trees and grasses and fungi and a host of micro-lifeforms that we never see but are dependent upon to survive. A teaspoon of a well-cared-for soil can contain up to one billion bacteria, several meters of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa, and scores of nematodes. Soil contains vast quantities of carbon and is a holder of surface water.

In the transitional zone between open-cut mining and rehabilitated post-mining landscape, soils are a carpet of hope rolled out to pacify the requirements of legislation. Mines managers assume soils will be resilient and cover up the mountains of Permian stone piled high. The small lives contained in soil often don’t transition well from pasture to the manufactured lands via heavy machinery, trucks, piles, bulldozers, and ploughs. It is asking a lot of one of our most valuable resources to cover up the sins of avarice.

Michael Northcott (theologian and ethicist) puts the problem this way:

… the earth and we are in co-creaturely relationship and … when we neglect the beneficence of God’s good earth and the prudential use of what God has granted to us, and subject nature … to our devices and desires, we not only frustrate the capacity of our fellow creatures to give God praise; we also put at risk the very services that the earth renders us.

Making earth bowls is a way of thinking about my ethical responses to soil use in a post-mining landscape. It is a way of thinking with my heart and not just my head. As I work with each Hunter Valley topsoil, I come to understand each as an individual, a special part of God’s creation. Each soil behaves according to its own chemical nature and historical past when I fashion it into a bowl shape. Some hold their shape, and some don’t; or perhaps, is it that some won’t? The agency (or will) of the soil is expressed by the way the bowl keeps form. Soils with good health often crack or crumble. Sad soils, those mistreated and overworked, stay where they are put.

Each bowl is made from a Hunter Valley topsoil, except for one. The grey bowl is mudstone doing its best to impersonate soil. It’s having trouble as it hasn’t been to the surface of the earth for 250 million years. Of all the soils, this one is the most sterile. This is the soil that will be found on the surface when we run out of topsoils rescued from mining. It is a legacy that our grandchildren will not thank us for.

So here is a question: What were those earth bowls doing on the altar? And on a white linen cloth? This is where you, the reader, come in. Art should make you question the world. Are those bowls made of dirt (plus all those beasties) that we should sweep out of the door and into the bin? Or are they made of soil that we should at least put on the garden, but really, they have no place in church? Or are they made of earth to be examined, to be questioned, to be listened to as earth-others?

These soils, full of tiny lives, are responsible for growing our food, making our air and storing atmospheric carbon. Our very lives as humans on the earth depend on them. By fashioning these soils into bowls and placing them in sacred places, I hope to remind us to honour the earth that we stand upon, that earth that speaks to us by pushing back at our feet. Soils deserve care and nurture, as they reciprocate to care and nurture us. Tangled in the web of earth understandings is a call to think about an intergenerational issue such as postmining land rehabilitation and building housing estates on prime agricultural soils. When we care for soils, we are in fact caring for ourselves and our descendants.

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Penny Dunstan is a soil scientist/agronomist and artist with particular interests in anthropogenic landforms and the human/land dialogue that arises when humans create the world. Her transdisciplinary PhD research investigated post-coalmining rehabilitated land at one mine site in the Hunter Valley, through fine art, human geography, and soil science. She has presented and published in a wide variety of forums including Hunter Valley Rehabilitated Mine Lands, National Soil Science Association, Institute of Australian Geographers, and Creative Arts forums in Australia and overseas. Penny is an accomplished artist who regularly exhibits work that details aspects of the Upper Hunter interactions with the Anthropocene. She works within and with Wonnarua country.