KEY POINTS:
The barn is large, airy, well-lit and sits in a peaceful valley surrounded by vineyards, a few hundred metres down the road from Waiheke's picturesque Owhanake Bay.
It's a great spot for creative activity. When Stephen Mulqueen first arrived, the barn was home for two tables and a vice, but the sculptor has, during a 12-week residency with the Waiheke Community Art Gallery, made it his own.
It is inhabited by a menagerie of composite animals in the final stages of preparation for the opening of a show that will conclude the residency.
Many are found objects that have been transmuted into sculptural identities by the addition of skeletal wire heads.
A barracuda has grown out of a cross-cut saw, wire albatross and gannet heads have sprouted from wooden-handle-bodies, a rusted shovel head has acquired the qualities of a wing, a large polystyrene rabbit sits near the wall and the torso of a massive wheeled kuri, its giant wooden head beside it on the floor, is taking shape in the corner.
They all have their story. The albatrosses, for instance, are a response to the comment in 1852 by Maori chief Horeta Te Taniwha of Ngati Whanaunga that gold miners in the Coromandel were like "the albatross seeking food" [Paul Monin, Hauraki Contested 1769-1875]. Te Taniwha believed pakeha would follow the birds' example _ having come from afar, they would leave once their need was satisfied.
Like Phil Newbury, holder of last year's residency, Mulqueen is a long way from home.
He is also largely based in Otago-Southland, where he was born.
He began working life in the late 1960s when he trained as a jeweller, but over time an interest in art theory and design philosophy saw him migrate from mass-market production, first to contemporary jewellery-making _ he was a founder-member of Dunedin's Fluxus workshop in the early 1980s _ and ultimately to large-scale sculpture.
Describing himself as "artist-archaeologist", Mulqueen's passion is the intersection of memory and place: the excavation of the past to relocate it in the present.
Name places are starting points for his digs, the signifiers of attitude and embodiments of history. His metaphorical tunnellings have led to a larger interest in the literal mining of the land, an ongoing fascination with Bluff and its estuarine environs, including the aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point.
This interest has opened a wider vein of exploration, with connections to sites in Tasmania, Queensland and beyond.
Mulqueen welcomed the Waiheke residency which started in June. "It's a great thing to have the opportunity to read, think, and reflect in a new setting," he says.
However, taking on a residency also means being uprooted from familiar environs and preoccupations, getting to know an unfamiliar landscape and a community not unlike your own but with subtly different motivations and rhythms.
That dislocation, in combination with establishing a workshop and finding materials and tools, makes the experience rewarding and in some measure, frustrating.
Mulqueen's answer has been to immerse himself in island life, drawing on the expertise of residents, complementing his own observations and discoveries with local knowledge.
He has been out and about, conducting workshops, giving lectures and presentations. He ferreted through the treasures in Waiheke Museum and is inspired by discussion with Waiheke historian Paul Monin and by reading his book, Hauraki Contested 1769-1875.
Out of this research comes the army of hybrid creatures that have flown and shuffled from the barn to the walls of the Waiheke Community Art Gallery.
They are first of all artefacts: scythes, sickles, saws and axes, implements of hefting and digging, agents of transformation, of shaping the land.
Countless handlings have seen them worn, cracked, dented and rusted. They are extended, with the addition of wire heads, and given a new existence as Mulqueen's birds and fish.
One work that will not leave the shed for the show is the large kuri that is destined to be a showpiece in Headlands 2009, the Waiheke Community Art Gallery's popular Sculpture on the Gulf early next year.
Typically, it is an amalgam of old and new.
Fashioned in metal and hardwood, with wheels from an old logging operation like a children's trolley-dog, it lurks in the corner but will not leave its kennel until February when it will sniff the ocean air.
On show
What: Stephen Mulqueen, Waiheke artist in residence
Where and when: Waiheke Community Art Gallery, Oneroa, Waiheke Island, to Oct 20
