Art: Entrancing the eye

BY TIM WATKIN

National pride and identity are bursting from a wall in the lower lobby of the new Royal & SunAlliance Centre in Shortland St. Hundreds of words - ranging from a few centimetres to a few metres high, but all long on meaning - hang from the vertical face, describing our country, our history, our collective hopes.

Katherine Mansfield's "Risk everything ... " is followed by Sir Edmund Hillary's "We knocked the bastard off." From aspiration to completion, they set the tone for the ambitious lobby of art below them.

The entrance lobby of the $200 million Royal & SunAlliance Centre is proudly, boldly, a New Zealand space for $1.3 million of New Zealand art.

One glance tells you this isn't New York, London or Sydney. Sure, there's the puffy armchairs, lift entrances, and coffee-stand you might find in office buildings anywhere on the planet. But most everything else declares it's New Zealand home - and not in that stuffy, 10-years-behind-the-times way that's so often marked for criticism in this country.

"We were trying to create a lobby that was unashamedly from New Zealand," says Richard Didsbury, managing director of building owners Kiwi Development Trust (KDT). "I think sometimes architects are criticised for doing buildings that could be anywhere in the world. So I made a conscious effort to say we're proud of our culture."

The 40-storey, 174m halo-topped skyscraper - the country's tallest office building - was officially opened on November 1. Best of all, the lobby is open to us all as a public gallery.

Those top couple of floors were only made possible by the art displayed down at ground level. KDT took advantage of an Auckland City Council bonus programme, in place since 1988, which encourages the creation of public art spaces.

Council senior policy planner Dave Sanders says, "The works of arts bonus means that for every 1 per cent of the total construction cost that the developer spends on the commission of art they get 5 per cent extra floor area.

"One of the things we have to look at pretty closely is to make sure they are accessible works of art. The bonus is on the basis of the art being a contribution to the public amenity."

KDT received 2123 sq m in exchange for $900,000 of art.

"It's a very positive incentive by the council that has not been picked up sufficiently by developers," Didsbury says, referring to the extra $400,000 spent. "We grabbed that opportunity, but we went much further than that." A committee made up of Didsbury, lobby architect Noel Lane, Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines and two tenant representatives, short-listed 20 leading artists, inviting them to prepare a submission. Even at this preliminary stage, each artist was given "a few thousand" dollars for their efforts.

"I didn't want an artist just to give me a proposal for something they'd be prepared to put anywhere," Didsbury says. "I wanted them to listen to what our motivation was, think about the space we were offering and put a proposal to us." Eventually, six major works were commissioned from Andrew Drummond, Ralph Hotere and Bill Culbert, Jacqueline Fraser, Gretchen Albrecht, Peter Roche, and Elizabeth Thomson.

Over by the cafe, bathed in light and redolent with coffee aromas, sits Thomson's largest work - First Forests. "It's based on the fruiting body of the liverwort plant," she says, perched in one of the oversized couches beside her work. "I've been working with similar elements since about 1993 in glass and using an interest in science and the microscope's view."

The liverwort was one of the first plants to colonise the land when it rose from the sea in ages past, Thomson says, and the work is based on how it looks through a microscope.

"You can actually see them [the plant specimens] with your eye, but they're very tiny," she says, indicating the 83 strands of blown glass. "They wouldn't necessarily grow exactly like that, but similar. I've put elements together and made up a work that exists in itself and is not absolutely actual.

"I was interested in capturing this flood of wilderness and these elements suited that, and I just wanted to reproduce them so they had more of a forest feel."

For the practical process of creation, Thomson drew on the skills of Victoria University scientific glassblower Grant Franklin and lighting designer Chris Chitty of Robo Technology.

Franklin had never worked with glass on such a large scale before, but the collaboration was innovative: two sections of glass were fused together to gain length and flasks were blown into new shapes to create the pods at the end of the end of the stems.

"We had a very primitive arrangement using concrete blocks and wood and foam," Thomson says. "Grant would be heating the glass and it would just slump naturally over the end of the table. The foam and the concrete blocks were holding one end on the table and I'd be catching it at the other end."

With Thomson's design requiring the work to change colour, Chitty came up with a relatively simple scheme to move the lighting through shades of red and green.

"I suppose the green is the land, the vegetation and the red is more a sea anemone type of thing," says Thomson, who has loved people's different interpretations of her glass.

"Last night John, who does the cleaning here, was sitting in this chair and the work was very red and pink and very beautiful. He said, 'Gosh, when it's red it's my favourite colour. It's so romantic I could fall in love with somebody here.' Other people have thought, too, that it was like hairs on the skin and somebody else said they think of it as genetic material."

Opposite First Forests, the scarlet and green Pohutukawa - The Cicadas' Song is Albrecht's largest work at 3.5m by 2m. In her own words, "It's richly coloured, sumptuous. It floats on the marble wall."

Down by the word wall, Drummond's 8.5m kinetic, brass wheel, called Device for the Assignation of Values, rotates like a ferris wheel at an A&P show. It is driven by an air piston system and Drummond says it is reminiscent of a colliery or bicycle wheel.

Together, alongside ceramics from the likes of Len Castle and Raewyn Atkinson and carpets by artists including Gavin Chilcott, these pieces make up a powerful collection, easily accessible in the Auckland CBD.

"It will be a meeting place," Didsbury predicts, as he looks around the lobby. "I think our problem will be that we won't have enough chairs."