April 12 - May 6, 2006 Unfolding Model

“… In a week exceptionally rich in art, the most spectacular exhibition is by Paul Dibble, whose bronze sculpture is at the Gow Langsford Gallery until May 6. He often works on the large scale where sculpture meets light engineering. Dibble uses the lost-wax process of casting bronze, a technique as old as Western civilisation. Dibble also uses sand casting, the staple of 19th-century engineering as well as space-age ceramics. These techniques made possible such huge flowing pieces as The Unfolding, which dominates this show. The work is 2.5 m high, with sweeping curves that simultaneously evoke a woman, a dolphin or a bird. It swoops like a predator but flows like a stream. It is a wave and a hook. It incorporates that most New Zealand of motifs, the koru form. There is a blade like an axe, yet it also has an intimate passage that evokes the vagina and the womb. Some of the curves are tightly geometric but there is also a richness and warmth in the shape of the thigh. It is this heavy, warm shape that contributes to the monumentality of the pieces allied to the movement and vitality of its curves. Although it is a comparatively slender work it looks as spectacular from the front as it does from the side. From in front, the spectacular forms suggest a flow of long hair and have the controlling force of fins. It is a masterly work, a culmination of Dibble’s long career of imaginative form and technological skill…..”

Excepts from review by T. J. McNamara in NZ Herald.