2016 Pathways

In 2016 the Stuart Residence Halls Council, a group strongly associated with the University of Otago in Dunedin, commissioned for their 75th anniversary a large work to fit within the University campus. The work was installed at the intersection of Castle and Union Walks, a site where hundreds of pedestrians travel daily, students traversing as they shift from one class to another.

For this commission Dibble created enlarged and abstracted bronze re-enactments of people sharing the crossroad, distributed in a random configuration that walkers might assume, with the same variations in posture and gesture.

Their placement forces those passing by to interact with them, becoming part of the artworks themselves; the figures no longer simple statuary, but an installation that inclusively welcomes people in.

Uniting the figures over the area is a large relief bronze cross with a lighting strip mounted into the ground; marking the intersection with a giant X, and evoking the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland. The surface of the cross is embellished with modelling to customise the work to its location, with various icons and motifs of Otago and the University. But it is the figures towering across the campus grounds that give the artwork presence, assemblages of mathematical forms but allegories of human-ness.