Nature Contained

Sculpture often provides us with conversations between nature and culture. Be it the little regular piles of wood shavings that appeared around the base of Wellington’s Kauri Old Government Buildings last Thursday, like the evidence of cultivated termites - Roman Ondak’s part of the One Day Sculpture programme - or the curvy outline of a figure against hill and sky, what we shape and construct out of nature is framed by it.

Louise Purvis’s Dog Head Hill is a large stone nugget that flips the relationship between culture and nature inside out and then, incredibly, twists it outside in again. The centrepiece of her exhibition Formed Land at Bowen Galleries, the flips and mirrors in its design make it like a giant Rubik’s cube type puzzle for both eye and mind.

It resembles at once both a computer-designed lump of rock and a brain. The ridges and grooves of its exterior are those of the landscape, but they’re the contour lines of topography or meteorology and have been folded around the stone like a three dimensional map containing the world. As physically seductive as this work is as a thing of beauty to stroke or follow pathways with your fingers, it’s what your brain starts to turn over about our relationship to the land as you do so that keeps you engaged.

The rock is black granite, sculpted into a symmetrical block that has in turn been quartered into sections, held apart from each other by stainless steel rods, like some piece of industrial machinery. It is as if the world has been captured by mathematics, yet metal stays have been put in place as it works to explode out from our mechanical grasp. As with Purvis’s previous work with rocks in steel containers there is a strong tension between human containment and nature that freshens up her elegant brand of minimalism (or as Donald Judd put it “the simple expression of complex thought”). Her work speaks strongly to the difficulties of our containing nature in the face of natural erosion while highlighting the beauty of our industrial and cultural forms. 

While the exterior surface of Dog Head Hill is flawlessly machined as a rough almost hairy coat, the interior granite is as smooth and as sparkly as an expensive kitchen bench. It is hard to believe they are the same stone.
Meanwhile below highly finished surfaces is nature contained.

Formed Land plays tribute to fellow sculptor Jeff Thomson, New Zealand’s dedicated twister of corrugated iron. Shift2 for example is a large button shaped disc made out of Carrara marble. It appears to have been put back together after having been smashed into fragments, but with each fragment sculpted with different sizes of corrugation that move around in direction like the hands of a clock. A sundial, with the movement of light and shadow across the landscape over the day.

While Dog Head Hill is sited too low - it would work more powerfully viewed at head height - Purvis’s wall sculptures encourage you to consider your physical perspective to the land. The beautiful River Tree in particular makes you aware that you are looking ahead of you as if you were flying above the land, the grooves undulating like the Wanganui below you on a flight to Auckland. The lines of the river resemble a tree as the root of a brain. To me it’s a symbol of the power of both thought and nature; the tension between our ability to conceptualise the world, and our inability to contain it.

Just up the road at Mark Hutchins Gallery James Robinson’s enormous wall sculptures are also beginning more to resemble landscapes with shifting perspectives, following recent residencies in New York and Wanganui. These can move in a glance between aerial topography of the fissures and ruptures of the earth, to zoom in on the matted build up of garbage half-buried in the earth, and zoom out again to architectural structures built up into the air.

While Robinson’s work has sometimes been suffocatingly introspective in the past in its post-punk existential angst, there is a wider, more powerful humanistic lens in operation here, with hope contained in the blossoms of Renaissance colour. While many of the smaller works remain confused expressionistic fragments to me (they have none of the cohesion or engagement with the world the often made comparison to Anselm Kiefer might suggest), the two large sculptural works here animate the violence of our relationship with the earth dramatically and beautifully. More of Robinson’s recent large work is on display at the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui until June 7.

Formed land, Louise Purvis, Bowen Galleries, until 4 April
Light Works, James Robinson, Mark Hutchins Gallery, until 18 April