KEY POINTS:
A poster in a music shop inspired Jim Cooper's version of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. "I thought that would be nice to build," says Cooper, who teaches ceramics at Otago University art school in Dunedin.
It took over a year to make the 100-plus figures that make up Sgt P, a fanciful recreation of the cover and of the 1960s.
It's a long way from the brown pots Cooper started out making in home town Westport in the early 1980s, at the tail end of the pottery boom. There were potters all up and down the coast road, many of them former coalminers inspired into clay by Northlander Yvonne Rust, who taught in a Greymouth high school in the 60s.
"I was fed by the Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada tradition," Cooper says. "I didn't start using coloured glazes until I went to [Dunedin] art school in 1984 and had access to the magazines."
Cooper went back to school in 1989, when he really started playing around with coloured glazes and building figures, making the shift from potter to sculptor. "That was more who I was. [The Leach tradition] was about discipline. This is not. It's about getting in and all the excesses of living.
"Being able to gloop the glazes on, I found me in there, whereas before, despite the appreciation of what I was doing, it was not me. I am not a Zen person."
Cooper had been prepared for the Sergeant Pepper's epiphany by a musician friend who dropped off a pile of CDs of 60s-era music. That led to other discoveries, with Satanic Majesties-period Rolling Stones a particular favourite. "Sergeant Pepper's comes with lots of myths. I like myth and magic. All those supposed hidden clues about all sorts of things that are supposed to be in the music and the packaging, it's all very appealing."
He did not attempt a direct copy. He had a go at some figures like Greta Garbo and Sonny Liston, and added others who weren't in the picture, like the Queen and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
Some of them fell over or blew up in the kiln. Bob Dylan never got his arms. Lawrence of Arabia is in there, as well as Indian gods like Vishnu.
"I was 12 when the cover came out and it was all very exciting. I knew something was going on but I was too young to know what."
Not that the record stands up so well. "I thought it was good until I started listening so I could build characters from the songs and chuck them in the crowd. I overcooked it"
Cooper thought he could knock off the work in a term break, but it took more than a year of huge days.
"I am pleased I couldn't get it done quickly because as time went on it was good to be able to pay attention. It's not about individual figures. It's about the crowd, that nice, seething mass.
"I love making. There is something naïve about when you've been there a few hours, right into it, and you hit that space where every song you play is the most perfect; the cup of tea is the perfect one. I love that kind of immersion. It was a fantastic learning process. I don't think I listened to anything in the studio that was made after 1971. I had missed it before and there is so much fantastic music done then. "
It was only after he started that Cooper became aware of the cover's connection not just to the high point of British pop but to British pop art - it was styled by artist Peter Blake. That's not something he felt the need to dwell on. "It's all about me. I'm selfish. I'm a worker, and I was listening to some of the most interesting music made and having a nice time making things. Any politics was a sideline. Sometimes when you open a bag of clay, especially when you have been doing it for a few days, you think, 'This is so right. I wouldn't be anywhere else'."
Cooper says he would like to do it again, maybe inviting the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club to the Satanic Majesties party.
What: Sgt P by Jim Cooper
Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, to April 19
