February 13 - March 10, 2013 Recent Sculpture

This exhibition contains a selection of studies, many featured in the recent text published by David Bateman and released in October 2012. We see parts of Paul Dibble’s assembled cast in conceptual stories he has played with within his oeuvre. Birds and dancers and their comment on the strength of youth, boys picking apples as analogy to life and its choices, the beauty of the kōwhai flower (titled The Gold of the Kōwhai, a line from one of the poems of William Pember Reeves) displayed as elegant trophies.

The big centrepiece of the exhibition, Moon-walker, has one of Dibble’s figures, out for a strident evening walk with storybook moon hung low in the sky and the birds already settling in to roost. It tells a narrative of two worlds in existence, with their tenuous interaction – man occupying the ground below with the birds, as curious watchers, in the skies. It uses the two materials of bronze and Corten steel, a media included in the sculptor’s artistic practice since 2008.