What: Arc by John Edgar
Where and when: Artis, 280 Parnell Rd, to November 29
Artist's talk: Thursday, November 12 at 6pm
John Edgar strides around his yard at the edge of the Whau River, stone from around the world stacked in orderly piles. There's golden sandstone from Rajasthan, granite from Scotland, basalt from Timaru and Wiri and the top of the Bombay Hills.
They are the fruits of a lifetime of collecting and sculpting hard materials into objects people want to hold and touch and wear next to their skin.
As he talks, the number 30 comes up repeatedly. That's how many years it's been since his first solo show, at the Denis Cohn Gallery in Durham St. He had started carving greenstone a couple of years earlier, after studying science at university.
"It was the 70s and I dropped out because I thought the world of science was narrow-minded, focusing in like a microscope, and I wanted to focus out like a telescope and I thought art would be a telescope. Eventually I found art was like science, you find something and focus in on it."
Edgar has brought science to bear on his work, though not in an obvious way. "There's my interest in geography and geology, the idea of the lie of land, why it's the shape it is, why some rocks stand proud and some wear away, which ones I will use for sculpture."
There are also the philosophical lessons from a lifetime of making and contemplating. Edgar says his early experience with pounamu taught him respect for his materials.
"You can impose an idea on greenstone but it's a very delicate and sensitive and intractable material, so if you don't listen to what the material is telling you, you will stuff up badly, which is what you see in a lot of [souvenir] shops.
"The stone should speak and the sculptor should speak and the two should meet in the middle."
While not a survey show, Arc is an attempt to put his career in some perspective.
"Most of the work is made in the past two years but some relates back to what I was making 20 or 30 years ago, not that I'm repeating - there's a continuity so I thought I would call it Arc."
There are cubes and rounded forms made out of interleaved stone, a bowl carved from a basalt crystal salvaged from a south Auckland gravel quarry, rods like core samples, and a tartan work out of the series done for a show at the National Museum of Scotland.
Over those 30 years, Edgar's work has blurred the line between craft and art. While the distinction may come down to "you'll know it when you see it", the debate does inform how we look at things. "Art is in the eye of the beholder, but craft is there forever," says Edgar, deftly slipping around the argument. "I love artefacts, things made by people that are functional or ritual, perhaps they were talismans or amulets. I love the fact you can see the hand of someone in there and if you can see their hand, you can see their mind as well.
"I've always gravitated to museums rather than art galleries. Museums are art galleries of the past. There's not enough craft and people don't understand and don't want to practice until they become good at something.
"I did make jewellery but I never thought of it as jewellery. I considered I was making amulets. Jewellery in the European sense is more related to something that might be decorative or that you wear on your clothing.
"I always wanted to make something people wear against their skin so it became part of them ... Out of that came the sculpture because I saw them as sculptures. I wanted to be a sculptor, even if I didn't realise it then."
Edgar cites his history of making things for people to wear and hold as being behind his ability to create large public sculptures, like the forms in the Auckland Domain.
"When I ask people why they like the work in the Domain, they say they like to sit on it, they like to feel it. It's still tactile, still personable. That is the key. It's not a remote thing. You can stand back and observe it, and you can get up close and give it a hug."
He's also noticed votive offerings appearing in front of the work.
While Arc is opening in Auckland, in Edinburgh his show Ballast: Bringing the Stones Home is closing.
Edgar's original idea for the exhibition was to use Scottish granite that came out here as ballast on ships, but found it was buried in seawalls and reclamations, and it was easier to make a pilgrimage to the original quarries.
Back in Auckland, Edgar set about combining it with New Zealand stone. "I said even though I have Scottish heritage, it was not about me, it was about bigger things, but it did become more personal as time went on. I've been sort of captured by Scotland as I was captured by New Zealand for 50 years.
" ... when I got to Scotland I realised part of my love of stone, my knowledge of stone, comes from a deep embedded cultural line of Scotsmen working stone, trying to grow things on stone.
"The love of stone is embedded deeply in Scottish culture."
He remains fiercely loyal to New Zealand, which has allowed him to pursue his creative ideas for three decades.
"I don't know where my next idea comes from but it always comes. If it didn't come, I wouldn't know how to make it come, but it's just fantastic, you're sitting there looking at something and something goes bingggg.
"It comes from so far out of me, an idea comes in like bolt of lightning and you think, 'Of course, why not make a cube'. That's a question I will ask until I die, where does creativity come from, and how lucky I am to have creative ideas."
