1988 Black Pearl Diver

Media: bronze on painted steel scaffolding.

The two artworks Black Pearl Diver, 1988 and The Empty Ocean, 1989 have been strange fits within the oeuvre of Paul’s works. They are unmistakably ‘Dibble’, those thin edges and undulating soft semi-abstract forms, that holds up as well as cradles, the props that hold up small fish in angles around the figures. But they are predictive of things to come and would have been unusual additions in the exhibitions they were part of, toured around to be shown at the Dowse, MAG and eventually Gow Langsford Gallery where they were sold.

They were long in the making because in these years Paul, and New Zealand bronze artists generally, had sketchy technical expertise and the casting, when you could even find someone to do it, was crude.

The diver was made first and it was inspired by watching the divers that fearlessly dived off the banks in Tahiti which he saw on our honeymoon, pitching themselves into dark seas in search of black pearls.

Paul had a fear of deep water that never left him. In these days learning to swim was done mostly by pushing someone off the peer and hoping they figured it out. There was an incident where he was sent to swim out to try and save his sister who had wondered into a rip, an uncle urging him on and, with her flailing, in the classic tale of how not to save someone she pulled him under. They did pull him back to shore and ‘pumped him out’ as they pragmatically put it. He never got over this event and was always in awe of people swimming in depths over their head. As much as he liked to splash about in the sea, always he stayed where he could put his feet down on the ground.

The long stretched side-swimmer in The Empty Ocean came after, a full year later.

The works speak really about isolation. The water beings, almost part seal or some strange aquatic mammals have an atmosphere of calm. We wonder if the props that hold them are meant to be invisible, only seen by us who reside on land. Our gravity defying swimmers need to be held up. The small struts and braces further emphasize how titan these figures are.