Current Exhibition:
Summer: sky above, earth below

Curated by Andrew Clifford

Our beautiful book that accompanies the exhibition Summer; sky above, earth below is now available for $35. Please contact artsadmin@sculpturepark.co.nz to reserve your copy.

Click here for a preview of the book!

The essay below was kindly written by Andrew Clifford, Curator, November 2011

Much contemporary art relies on a disconnected experience so is exhibited in an allegedly neutral ‘white cube’ gallery space. Self-contained and segregated from the distractions of the surrounding world, art is meant to speak for itself but is also put on life support. In a location like the Waitakaruru Arboretum, with 42 acres of regenerated hillside and panoramic views of rural Waikato, the world is impossible to ignore. Rather than risk being overwhelmed by this vast -landscape, art must confront its place within the site and wider environment. Through the title Sky above, earth below, Waitakaruru’s annual summer outdoor sculpture exhibition aims to do just this. Put simply, it's about being situated in an environment.

As A.D. Schierning’s work in this exhibition reminds us, the land we inhabit sits between the earth and the stars, a space that Ma-ori legend describes as once being caught in the tight embrace between Ranginui and Papatuanuku (the heavens and the earth). This is consistent with thinking about our place in the world being defined by everything around us, a point on a map defined by a series of bearings – you are here. X marks the spot as a moment of compression and relativity to form a single event from a combination of others. DJN and John Edgar explore this dynamic with reference to maps, flags and the history of Waitakaruru as a former quarry site.

Historically speaking, X is the temporal link we create between what has been and what will come, a moment of trans-formation that shifts the past into the future. Regan Gentry’s precarious chimney not only incorporates the ancient geological history of erosion, eruptions and the production of pumice stones, but also New Zealand’s relatively more recent history of settlement and how unstable our occupation of the land can be. Gaye Jurisich’s Crib, produced with materials found nearby, also suggests a temporary residence, a resting place suspended between sky and earth, integrated into its surrounds.

Perhaps inevitably, many of the works in this exhibition respond to the environmental concerns that are at the heart of Waitakaruru’s larger project to rehabilitate a former quarry site – the park recently qualified as a permanent Forest Sink and won the right to sell carbon credits. Challenging the distinction between nature and culture, Leon van den Eijkel’s Urban Tree continues his on-going exploration of colour being emblematic of both, and questions the survival of human technology.

Like van den Eijkel’s trees, Tiffany Singh’s bamboo wind chimes operate in collaboration with their environment, suspended from existing structures and activated by the weather. This is similar to Stuart Bridson’s camera obscura, where the primary effect of the work is not embedded in the object itself but how that object focuses a much larger realm of activity to create a new relationship between viewers and their world. Through the inter-relatedness of life, we always see one thing in the light of another, whether we are looking through something or from one vantage point to another, in a prismatic or kaleidoscopic manner that informs and transforms our perception; in this way, we absorb, reflect and create our own environment, at once an observer but also embedded within it as a participant.

Singh also connects the physical world with the spiritual world of her Asian -heritage. Chimes are believed to bring good luck, placed to influence the flow of good fortune or ‘chi’ through a space, causing positive energy to linger. Nearby, Doug Neil’s Celestial Canoes consider the personal voyages we all take, both physical and spiritual, traversing oceans and heavens in our dreams and aspirations.

Sky above, earth below is about the co-existence and co-dependence between humans, animals, insects, plants, clouds, and the cosmos. However different or separate, small or massive, all things are related. This recalls an old alchemical saying of ‘as above, so below’, which refers to the interconnectedness of all things, including vast and microscopic systems. For example, the blueprints for the universe can be found in the molecules of the smallest speck of dust, and vice versa.

It might seem a truism to speak of interconnectedness, but in the networked world we now live in, life has become increasingly bunkered. From the isolation of our own room, social media allows us to safely interact with and manage dozens if not hundreds of friends. With such distance and independence, it is easy to lose sight of our utter interdependence. In a contemporary consumer environment, everything is available for us and yet we are unable to act independently of the commercial and technological infrastructures that seemingly empower us.

An important function of art’s process of transformation is to shift the way we view things. Waitakaruru's extraordinary surroundings, in a relatively open landscape with wide horizons, is a situation that is rare in the much tighter confines of city spaces where art is usually found. In this kind of raw environment, the way we inhabit the earth is much more evident, be it through microscopic organisms and individual entities, or ecological concerns at a more planetary scale. The environmental concerns addressed by the Waitakaruru Arboretum provide an ideal platform from which to explore these issues.

Click here to listen to Andrew Clifford with Kim Hill on Radio NZ

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