November 20 - December 9, 2004 Mr and Mrs

This new collection of sculptures by Paul Dibble uses straightforward New Zealand imagery, simply composed, that acknowledges our regional art traditions. Don Binney was one of our best New Zealand icon painters of the 1960s and ‘70s. An exhibition of his artworks recently toured the country and was on at Te Manawa last month. These studies of Dibble’s look back at these historic paintings to produce his own iconic renderings of birds above pieces of New Zealand landscape.

Some of the birds are like sculptural ‘Binney’s’, partially abstracted with silhouetted edges, jests of three-dimensional forms as from the side they can be seen to be only wafer thin shapes. The birds fly triumphantly above, with ground below. They are present in assemblages that emphasize the space between land and sky. Proportionately the birds are massively over-scaled yet are accepted visual illusions as they make up understood pictures of a nostalgic New Zealand wonderland. Close inspection reveals how cleverly they are composed.

On ground level the imagery represented is familiar. There are the volcanic cones of our forgotten Pa sites or the small colonial churches that dot rural landscapes. There are the wind-swept manuka, bent over in unison from sheltering from the repeated gusts, such as can be seen in the trees around the Wellington region. There is a still neglected boat, so still without a ripple on the rainwater that has collected in its hull. Contrasting above is a tūī in full, frantic flight. The lines of the bird’s wings are echoed in the lines on the boards on the clinker boat, and in composition the diagonal movement of the bird’s flight transverse to the lines in the boat below.

As well as being works of great beauty they are studies that try to distil the essence of New Zealandness. These mixed compositions of elements are uniquely ours.