Light and dark of visibility at Vavasour Godkin Gallery

Drummond's kinetic sculptures are about change. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Andrew Drummond has a history of working outdoors. During the 1970s and early 80s, like many of his peers, he started his career staging fleeting, ephemeral works, often in the landscape.

Out of concern for the environment and usually only accompanied by a photographer, Drummond performed ritualistic tasks in remote sites, aided by sculptural implements such as a specially prepared backpack. His activities included cleansing and filtering on the Aramoana mudflats and laying a 500m vein of copper tubing in an abandoned Otago water race.

In recent years, Drummond has been preoccupied with large-scale public works and private commissions, including Listening and Viewing Device, an enormous copper-coil funnel in the Wellington Botanical Gardens, and the giant wheel in the Royal Sun Alliance building.

"If I go back into my own practice and how I was thinking about the landscape in the late 70s and early 80s, I was actually interested in not interfering with it but doing something that was so subtle it was just a record of it," says Drummond, who has four projects on the go, including one that will take more than three years.

"As time moves on, I guess one's practice moves on, one's ideas move on and I got offered some opportunities to do bigger pieces. And I was more interested in not just the ephemeral issue, but a more substantial, longer-term presence."

Not only is The light and dark of visibility his first gallery exhibition since 2002, and the first in Auckland since 1998, but it is his first in Auckland to focus on photography as more than just documentation.

Drummond works in a Christchurch studio, a converted 1915 power station where he has up to six staff working for him at any one time.

"A lot of it is about just management, actually, so I'm just about to employ someone who does nothing but quantity surveying and putting budgets together for me," he says, describing a recent quote that exceeded $1 million.

Although Drummond acknowledges a centuries-old history of public art in Europe, he says New Zealand is still maturing and that will lead to more local work.

"That's got something to do with the fact that New Zealand has only just got its drains and roads and stuff sorted out. We are still in a very early stage of adding value to the environment and so artists are just beginning to be thrown opportunities.

"It's a cultural maturity. It's feeling better about one's self and who we are and why we're here, what we do and what we think of ourselves."

Drummond's early performance works that explored relationships between body and landscape still have a lot in common with his sculptural pieces, especially when he's building machines.

"Now, all of the work does perform," he says. "It has its own life and it goes through an action which may change the material or manipulate the material in some way. And of course the materials so often are out of the landscape still, and that's the consistent part."

The material that has particularly fascinated Drummond over the past seven years is coal, which he says is a resource that still has potential and can be beautiful with its intense blackness.

"The coal sparkles with light and it's really black and really dirty but really light as well. I was playing around in the studio with a machine I'd made and I started seeing all the light coming off it.

"When I was making the first of [my] kinetic works, I was interested in 19th-century science and I have always made work which has got a kind of scientific feel to it. And then there was the 19th century where coal was such a big thing and in the 21st century we look at coal as being dirty and polluting and producing carbon dioxide gases, and yet it's not being used properly. It's being bypassed and they are still thinking about it from the 19th century.

"The other thing interesting for me is that once there were trees and then there was coal and next could be diamonds, through the compression of the landscape. We live in an incredibly turbulent landscape. It moves all the time and there's always earthquakes and it's being thrust up and down and making coal all the time."

Turning at less than one revolution per minute, Drummond's kinetic sculptures defy the assumption that machinery is about speed, instead having more in common with the environmental cycles of the machine we call nature.

"We think machines do things quicker and better than we do and we invest that kind of sensibility into a machine. To make a machine that, in a way, is so slow you can almost not see it happening, to me is really, really interesting.

"In New Zealand, because we are geologically young, over 200 years a river will move 5km - it's not that slow, really. We like to think the earth has been the same forever but it has not. It is always slowly changing."

What: The light and dark of visibility by Andrew Drummond
Where and when: Vavasour Godkin Gallery, 2nd floor, 35 High St, to Nov 5