November 12 - December 4, 1983 Paul Dibble

The most flamboyant of Paul’s experimental pieces were the parrot construction works. In these he used long metal probes that would extend to points in far extremes around the gallery room – “marking points of space” - and on the end of each would hang a metal parrot. The parrots were fashioned as copies of folk toys, a bottle top glued on the tail to act as a weight, rocking if tipped or sometimes just from a breeze.

The parrots on these lengths made strong vertical and horizonal lines dominating the space. They were painted in bright colours so they could stand out at the end of the long lengths of rod. Perhaps these stark lines came from Paul’s memories of landscapes around the flat of the Hauraki Plains; in times of floods from the Firth of Thames when the water settled over miles of the flat land, objects would stick out from the water, seeming to mark points of space in an empty landscape. The rods with the parrots mark space in the same way.

Supplementing were various additional items. In Concrete in the Garden, 1981 a brick structure is built into a corner and a figure sunbathes on a small patch of lawn, a cluster of fruit beside him. In Locating a Fish in a Garden, 1983, a scaffold of swimmers moves in the backdrop, doing a free style stroke along an imaginary sea line. In this work the shape of a stylised fish makes up the framing of the structure that the rods spring from, rather than it stretching to the room’s parameters. In these metal cut outs we can see the beginnings of the ‘foldings’, the next body of works to emerge in Paul’s search for a method of making art more permanent. This making of a form shape (rather than occupying the entire room), was utilised in the parrot works made for outdoor settings. Farewell to a Friend, 1983, used the shape of a ship setting sail to mark out its dimensions. This was a temporary work made as part of an artists’ festival in Dunedin.