March 17 - April 28, 2002 Norsewear Art Awards, Guest Artist

The work drawn together for this exhibition comes, in content, from Dibble’s study of New Zealand as a paradisial garden. A falling leaf; an elegant, quietly sitting woman; and a propped-up huia feather look as though collected from some lost biblical garden.

The works at first seem huge (they are approximately two to three metres in height), monumental in scale but also with full solid forms. This monumentality is in part an illusion; when viewed from the side angle the works can be seen to be actually modelled in semi-relief form, with the edges and none of the huge mass at first suspected. They thus contain a classical element from European notions of sculpture yet still realise their South Pacific origins enacted in the styles of carving seen in canoe prows or in South Pacific sculpture.

The works carry an atmosphere of quiet, sobriety and serenity. The woman sits as if a guardian, watching some distant scene of landscape. Made in Dibble’s studio in Palmerston North, one of New Zealand’s few land-locked towns, they speak of isolation and contemplation.