The picture

A story without pictures may come across as unappealing.

We have come to accept, with the advent of phone photo and cut and paste techniques, stories will be accompanied by pictures, to show the way the story is advanced, or point where the story is headed. 

As a child, consecutive pages of text unbroken by pictures was too hard to bear. You had to hold your breath between pictures. The older we got, there was a  longer space between pictures in our reading. 

With the advent of horror/erotic adventure movies for grown ups, we have all become children again, in our need to be entertained, in ways we remember or were accustomed, or need to retrieve in light of other deficits. 

The  story I tell today has no pictures and presents itself here as blocks of text on the screen. 

The reader will need to imagine the pictures the text describes. 

Here is the story. 

A tree has grown quickly, appeared suddenly between trips to Patonga, and had considerably obscured the view of the water, which is central to our enjoyment  here. 

Growing next door, we thought we should check with the tenants, if not the owners of the house, would they mind if we trimmed the tree to retrieve our view of the water? 

 ‘Not at all, go ahead’. 

The combination of flimsy permission, a stiffening older body, rain, and a rusty saw made the trimming task a challenge. 

A snake had been sited last week in the garden in which the tree was growing. Bare feet and slippery conditions  were hazard lights I ignored. 

(Hazard lights are part of all landscapes now. They compete for attention with  Pokémon characters also scattered frequently.)

How much is too much of the tree should be removed? Hacking a living organism is cruel.
The limbs fell as I cut them, landing in the creek. They seemed modest in size contained within the tree but spread in size, so the little bay in front of the house is full of them and the view still not retrieved. 

When painting a picture, you make a mark and you step back to make an objective judgment. With every branch removed now, a new determination was available on what would be the next move, the next branch to be removed. 

You have to be bold but not reckless to make progress. Two other sets of eyes provided further assessment which was integrated. 

Bit by bit, the view emerged as we remembered. The blunt saw had produced a rough cut but the tree retained a character and shape we found acceptable. 

Much of the waste was dropped into the gulley behind the house. The gulley is quite big but dumping the full load was beyond the gulley’s capacity. 

The rest would be put on the dinghy, hauled across the creek and strapped to the truck parked in the caravan park to be dropped at the tip. 

There were three us who would drag the loaded dinghy across the creek but the largest branch fell off half way.  While I  held the branch from sinking, J & P rowed the remainder ashore. 

It is an unusual burden, a tree, no longer full of air and wind. The branch cut was full of berries. Glistening berries submerged now held no promise of a future life.

The reader can picture the scene now, in their mind. Overcast, chilly, the pull of the outgoing tide.

They can picture J & P rowing the remaining load ashore, unloading the branches one by one and carrying them to the truck and then upending, side-ending the boat to remove the water from last night’s storm. 

Is it possible to be a spectacle and watch a another spectacle at the same time?

Finally, J & P return with the emptied dinghy. We manage to haul the branch from the water into the boat.  

The berries have become the eyes of a fresh catch. The breeze the tree so recently caught was its last breath. 

With J hauling us from the water, with my rowing and P using the branch as a rudder, we achieve the other shore. 

We will drop the load tomorrow at the tip on our way home. 

Today I trimmed the rough cuts from the tree. 

Were you able to read without holding your breath? Were the words pictures?

***

This post was written four years ago next January.

The tree has been removed by the new owner of the house.

I didn’t publish four years ago. The picture I painted wasn’t quite compelling enough. Either my standards have dropped or I can forgive the story meandering or see its attenuated nature now as ok.

While the tree has been removed to reveal the view, the house has been, is being demolished, and will be replaced by a much larger building. Watch this space!


'Maennerchor' 2025

‘Maennerchor’ was exhibited at Sculpture by The Sea in 2025. The title means ‘Men’s choir’ in German. Different voices coming together in harmony hopefully. The work is the second last of the compilation sculptures which were made from individual works from “The Folded Forest’, from my exhibition at Australian Galleries in 2020.

Different views and light conditions show the onerous task of photography to represent a sculpture.

Painted Corten Steel

‘Maennerchor’ at Sculpture by The Sea

Photo courtesy of Charlotte Curd

NAS Notes

NAS Notes

I studied sculpture as a non-diploma student at NAS in 71 and 72. The diploma course officially ran for five years.

At that time ‘qualifications’ were anathema to seriousness. When I left at the end of 1972 however, I was deemed to have ‘fluffed out’ by several teachers. They felt I was unequipped to proceed alone in the art world.

Several years later, I was fortunate to be employed in part time teaching in drawing and sculpture at NAS. It was through teaching that I learnt how much I did not know about sculpture and drawing. My students and I learnt about these areas together.

More recently in the sculpture department, new staff have been employed without the benefit of a thorough art education. Teachers now are graduates of university art schools. They have little to no knowledge of the fundamentals of sculpture, painting or drawing. Graduates of universities tend to be visual illiterates, unless they have had other education. Qualification to teach now requires post graduate qualifications only achieved from universities.

New teachers now are as unequipped as I was, when I started teaching.

I hope that new staff learn about sculpture (and drawing), on the job as I did, with the benefit of those equipped with the skills that have been reliably offered at the school.

The university trained artist has limited language to speak. Their training is in the manipulation of ideas. The works made are illustrations of ideas. These artists tend to rely on ‘materiality’ to deliver a life in the work, in the absence of a more formal language. The material is always the servant of the overriding idea.

The National Art School has argued recently, that there was a need for turning a new leaf, that the sculpture school in particular, had become mired by a limited vision. To bring about new life, extreme changes were necessary.

Ironically, the school was now overrun by the philosophy to which it had for fifty years been in opposition.   

Having previously been overwhelmed by opposition to well-meaning improvements to the school, I am happy to take a back seat and watch, or not watch what ensues.

The buildings have always insinuated themselves into the philosophy of the school. The buildings, the history have always had the final say. 

The End of Trump

We have seen everything of Trump but the end of him.

In the absence of that end, here it is.

The work is related to recent ‘blackboards’ but here applied to steel, where, unprotected from rain, the words will be erased, unless the chalk be replaced with a greasy chalk to emulate the chalk.

Alternatively the letters could be cutout and removed, but can politics enter art that far?

The End 2004 - 2025

The End 2004 - 2025

Gaza. People as Architecture

 

We have been startled recently by video footage and images of Gaza in ruins.

People are moving around as if they still are able to live there despite the devastation. 

It is as if walls and rooves intact are not the precondition for living there. These people are moving around in a grim acceptance of, ‘This is our life and it remains our home’. 

That ‘ruins’ can still function as ‘home’ interrogates what home is.

Gaza now

These broken environments draw the eye for reasons other than shock and horror.

As a result of the bombings, the usual divisions between boundaries is broken. The roads no longer divide the houses from each other. Boundaries between properties no longer exist because they are no longer there. The dominating vertical and horizontal lines that are a feature of most built environments, are absent. As a result there is a new unity in the images, between the people  and the broken buildings.

These broken buildings can still present themselves as ‘home’ to the Gazans. They are clearly determined to stay.

Gaza now

Perhaps Israel and the US believes that with destruction comes abandonment, but this increasingly does not seem to be the case.

It is as if the Palestinians themselves become the surrogate architecture, to become the dominant vertical feature, to replace the buildings.

Note: These images are drawn from the internet from various sources. We should be wary of manipulation but also trust our interpretive capacity.

Blackboards

Sculptor Michael Legrand describes occasional deviations from his central practice as ‘aberrations’. I’m not sure if he still entertains such urges.

My practice sometimes seems governed by ‘aberrative’ inclinations.

When one finds oneself compelled to do something and the intellect has no power to overpower or contextualise that urge to desist, you do it.

My blackboard works counter my usual art practice by being ephemeral. They occupy outside an art context. They are realised without my usual appetite for weight and scale and the pleasure of physical effort.

My blackboard works are ‘slight’. They are also conspicuously unnoticed. They seem to tire quite quickly, needing to be renewed every month or so.

Having said that, I am motivated to keep doing them. I rejoice in doing them. Their futility and commodity independence liberates them and me. That they are erased and to find only a modest afterlife in the blog, seems adequate and fair.

YAY and Still Alive is the first ‘blackboard’ that uses both panels, to make a dialogue across the dividing door to the other panel.

Many thanks to Courtney at Ciao Thyme, Darling Street, Balmain, for providing this platform.

Wamboin Postcard

I am fortunate to have space here at Wamboin to explore the different ways that works can be placed to show their best aspects. I am fortunate also to have been able to keep works and to have retrieved works that were purchased. The works here are in rotation, moving, looking for their resting spots where they can be their best selves.

The works sometimes enjoy each other’s company and at other times prefer to stand alone to take up the whole space to find their voice.

These photos show works where they currently stand, at particular times of the day and in different light, with and without shadows. The works change as they are moved. With each siting, they are remade.

The assembly of all of them make up one work, which, for better or worse. is my life’s work.

These Wamboin Postcards show the state of flux that exists in the ‘solidity’ which sculpture promised.

Slow Turn 2, 2024

Installation Wamboin

Boat, 1978, Flower, 2016 (middle ground), 3 Fold 2019 (background)

Slow Turn 2, again.

The Arena is an open-air workshop where finished works compete with accidental and long-term experiments

Spine, 2020 with Brooch 2011 in background

Broken Tunnel, 2017, renamed from The Moment

The Room 1990- 2020

Third World 2018

The Miner 2019

Air

The Sydney School of Sculpture. Further Notes

In the nineteen seventies, when we were on top of the world and invincible as sculptors, we had measures in place to determine the success of our work. 

We had independent judges, unaligned and principled, who supported clarity above loyalty. We were a machine, unparalleled, unequivocal. The standards established by our predecessors at The National Art School, namely Lynden Dadswell, Bertrand McKennell and Raynor Hoff were sketches for the sculptures we were making. 

Our mission saw no limits.

We were The Sydney School of Sculpture which was without parallel anywhere. Nowhere was there such a sustained conversation about what sculpture had been, and what it could be. In the context of the long conversation about sculpture, this one hundred years extension of that discussion has continued and remains relatively unacknowledged.

The sculptors then were a sculpture family. Like with all families we laughed and loved, we argued and cried. We broke like families do. We formed allegiances that lasted and didn’t, then did again. Over fifty years there were many permutations available for different relations however the sculptural conversation continued.

Those of us then who were young have been joined by young sculptors now. Our program has exposed the folly of a generational zeitgeist. This business we mean is for all time and sculpture serves to slow an unsustainable flow of time. Even from within the group, some of us have died and this thing we are part of, is outside of us. It is its own animal.

None of us much are in love with the material of choice. The shaping of steel makes us deaf and dirty. Neighbours shun us and even ask us to move away. When work is complete it is heavy to move, expensive even, which makes it not the darling of the curatorial profession, which is shaped by budget above taste.

The work we make is often big, too big for internal spaces, it is mostly placed outdoors where it is exposed to human and other nature. We remain sometimes too much a product of a particular appetite for large scale work inherited from American ambition. Some of us, many of us have adopted an appetite for a more sensible, modest scale. Watch this shrinking space!

For the community at large what has been consistent over fifty years is the appetite for material has been ‘anything at all’ so long as it is not steel! It is ironic, this ambivalence for steel when steel is the innocent bystander and is more the space divider. There is talk, art historically of ‘negative space’, when in fact what brings all the sculptors together in the sculptural language is the sharing of positive air.  

It is air we share more than steel.

To recognise a work belongs to the SSS movement, it will be the shape of air you admire or despise, not the steel. The steel is the messenger. If you find yourself looking at the material of the sculpture rather than the air, it probably belongs to a different family of sculpture.   

New Commission

I have this week installed a new commissioned screen in Surry Hills.

The client gave an open brief which allowed me to be informed by his collection of paintings. Without losing my voice, I made a work which was informed and informed other works in the home.

The work was to function as a screen to contain the space and to provide some light but not too much.

I made a model which I showed the client to confirm my direction.

Paper model 40 × 30cm

Cutting in process

Plasma-cut, and bent using oxy-acetylene.

Because of the restricted access, the work needed to be light. Being light, to limit distortion the plate was framed, which would also provide a fixing point. The drawing was done in chalk and cut with a plasma.

Suspended, to indicate level of transparency

The aim always is to make something authentic. Authentic ‘denotes an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive and responsible model for human life’, according to existentialist philosophy. It is always evident when a work lacks authenticity.

I still don’t have a title for the work. Most often by now a title has occurred to me. The title needs to be simple, memorable and descriptive to aid memory.

The light spills into the courtyard dropping shadows randomly appropriately.

Shadows

You want to make a tight work, a taut work, but it has to be a bit open too, to find its place, to make its shape legible.

Water, Fat and the letter U.

With the sound of the flow of water 

The water inside me wants to be with that water. “Let me out of here!”, the water inside me says. “I want to go home”.

All the water wants to band together to be part of a puddle, a pond, a lake. 

It is water’s way and cannot be overcome. 

There’s a queue to get out of me and a queue to get in. 

The fat in the milk, the cake, that roll with dinner. They’re all calling out  to join me, to come into me, to become part of the fat castle.

The fat colludes to overpower my appetite to be thin. 

The fat is empowered by my desire of it. The engine of my desire draws it to me. I am its lord and saviour. 

I am the fat magnet.

There’s a third queue, words with U.

TBC

.

The Appetite for The Sculptor's Supper Club

There’s talk of starting up the old Sculpture Supper Club again.

For those who didn’t know of it or never went, the club consisted of a group of sculptors who shared similar hopes and sculptural values.

The aim was to have a civil discussion about sculpture with comments filtered through a chair. Discussions would be interspersed with entrée, main and dessert, with alcohol consumed at a level to reduce inhibitions without losing them.

We had met from the mid-eighties to the late nineties, often monthly, but probably ten times a year.

Ultimately for one reason or another, nobody knows which, the dinners stopped.

Some of those sculptors now are older. Others have no horizon over which to peer. Some sculptors will relish the prospect of the dinners starting again while others, smarting still, may restrain themselves.

There remains an appetite for discussion and for the meals we enjoyed at Tetsuya initially and for the last several years at Bon Riccordo in Paddington. Where and how and when we may meet soon is yet to be determined.


*

The Choir 2024

 

Outsiders and other sculptors wondered at our commitment to the dinners. The dinners seemed more inward looking than genuinely inquisitive. That is often the way when groups gather and by gathering differentiate themselves from others.

When I was a young sculptor in the early seventies, it was a moment of great hope and vision in our collective cultural voice. Our predecessors had not had the advantage of this optimism and had gone off to Europe mostly, or America where they could find opportunities to realise their personal ambition, where eyes and ears were open and curious to register meaning when it was presented.

By the mid-seventies we were confident we had both the scope to speak and listen, without leaning into a foreign culture, a foreign voice.

In the mid-seventies we were confident that we could synthesise our being here in this new and different place to which our forebears had brought us.

It is conceivable that those aspirations were exhausted by the end of those dinners in the last days of the twentieth century. It is possible that our hopes and vision had come to nothing or that by then there should have been some cultural recognition of our presence. Our awakening had not brought all of us alive to the same opportunities.

Recently ambitious younger sculptors have seen the light and gone away. The recognition of an absence of discerning ears and eyes and the limited dollars on offer was clear and obvious.

What is remarkable about Australia is that we have made work and continue to make work because we can. The making of work is the support of it. Because of the limited appetite for our work, we have had to be responsible for the work we make. This aspect can be challenging however, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are privileged.

Recently, in the last ten years or so, I have come to see that my voice is not a singular activity. I have recognised in fact that if I do not see my voice as being part of a collective choir of voices, then I have no voice at all. Individual strength is always group sourced.

Stay posted.

 

 

Armed

Cars often conceal their occupants with their tinted windows. Some activities however, necessitate an open window.

There are two innocent subjects here. There’s the hand that shows it has not yet been employed, and there’s the new beautiful yet unsmoked cigarette.

A brand new cigarette is a thing of beauty. Held by such a hand as this, what could go awry?

By Five Dock, from Iron Cove Bridge, this newness already will have passed. All that whiteness will have gone away. There will be nothing much to spin between the fingers.

2 Queues

With the sound of the flow of water 

The water inside me wants to be with that water. “Let me out of here!”, the water inside me says. “I want to go home”.

All the water wants to band together to be part of a puddle, a pond, a lake. The water inside me has no sense of belonging only a need to betray me. 

It is water’s way and cannot be overcome. 

Water is in a queue to get out of me.

There’s another queue.

Water in Darwin 2022

The fat in the milk, the cake, that roll with dinner. They’re all calling out to join me, to come into me, to become part of the fat castle.

This fat colludes to overpower my appetite to be thin. 

The fat is empowered by my desire of it. The engine of my desire draws it to me. I am its lord and saviour. I am the fat magnet. While the water is disloyal, the fat’s lingering presence is unwelcome.

Thin arm