March 3 - March 28, 2009 Thoughts About Men and Birds

When New Zealand broke off from the continent of Gondwana, those 80 millions years ago in deep time, it turned in on itself and became a microcosm, an island that invented new rules, creating an environment mystical and magic. In this fauna, where mammals fell to subservience, birds triumphed, with their strange, adapted forms of darkened plumage, some with flightless gaits - unfearing.

Dibble’s new bird works in this exhibition, “Thoughts About Men and Birds”, are triumphant beings, majestic forms, soaring upwards as if to herald a joyous land, or jauntily fluttering.

In the artist’s toolbox they are a play of the sensuous quality of fluid shapes next to firm geometric scaffolds. The birds are, characteristically Dibble, flat semi-relief shapes, pushed into part three dimensional by a swollen quality, but essentially flat planes with rounded forms, tails that flutter and projected shapes that occupy space as cut out shapes. Their perches, in the smaller as rings calling to mind domestic perches where a budgerigar might be homed but in the larger squared and rectangular as though open windows through which the bird has set sail, are fixed onto the birds at right angles forcing the artwork to occupy a three-dimensional space.

Together it produces a harmonised stability, the geometric framework balancing the fluid horizontal of the bird forms. There is some tension in the mix. There are awkward movements in some of the fingers of the Fantail’s tail, an intentional ziggurat giving a notion of the quick darting movements of the birds themselves. The tūī, abstracted to sleek and streamlined becomes almost angel-like, the woodpigeon with cyprus tree is as still as a quiet morning. For this series was brought about from the artist observing the birds from his bedroom window in early spring.

Birds are those small beings that accompany us on planet earth - portraying images of elegance, quiet wisdom as if sage, or as trickster laughing while serious calamities like death loom. In New Zealand, a land of birds and men, who arrived later as startled newcomers, they are strangely bound.