March 22 - April 15, 2007 In the Sticks

The exhibition “In the Sticks” in 2007 was the artist’s first exhibition after making the New Zealand Memorial and Paul always attributed its flamboyance to a reaction to the constraints of the structure for London’s Hyde Park Corner Memorial commission.

‘Stick’ is a metaphor itself in the way it is used in the New Zealand vernacular – ‘giving stick’ (teasing someone), ‘not the sharpest stick’ (a person who is not very smart), and ‘in the sticks’ (a place in the countryside). The sticks formed a backdrop, with rounded edges and snapped off ends they were a repetition of uprights, marking a rhythm in frames where different scenarios could be discovered amidst the woodland.

The scenes were by intention a varied group. Some are time fixed moments, like horses in mid gallop, the sticks acting as markers of their movement, references to the distance travelled as they go hurtling past. Some have a theatrical quality. The melodrama of a furious fight between a British lion and the large indigenous moa bird is acted out. A nude woman reclines on a couch, a three dimensional Rousseau in a diorama of sticks with odd posts with moa head tops, all together in a hidden glade.

There were less unusual portraits. A bull, massive in form beside slender twigs although scrawny with displayed ribs, stands still in the naked forest, producing an atmosphere of disquiet – is he some lost animal now part of a wilderness? A photographer and model are doing a photo shoot; one study shows a car where young lovers are parked on a deserted lane. But there is one constant that links all these fantastical tales together, these small town stories, and that is the sticks: a steady, irregular downbeat, a vertical slicing of space as reference points.