Impossible to join the dots

Like its maker, the work of sculptor Anton Parsons doesn't give much away, preferring to assert its presence in a quiet, reflective manner that lets the audience (or interviewer) do most of the talking.

One of Parsons' signature styles is his use of Braille. Through this use of language, his sculptures seem to have a lot to say but they remain silent and elusive, evading translation.

There is a paradox to much of Parsons' work. On one hand, his pieces seem to confront the viewer with their large scale, bristling with information or getting in the way, but also offering emptiness. They are highly visible but encoded only for those without sight.

This enigmatic presence is typified by his public commission Invisible City on Lambton Quay in Wellington, or Gone Fishing, the enormous blue wall-work in the Price-Waterhouse Cooper's building on Quay St.

The text in Gone Fishing is so large it becomes unreadable, even to a blind person. And even a blind person with a ladder would have difficulty making sense of Invisible City, with its characters wrapping around all sides of the two stainless steel slabs, with no clue to where each line begins and ends.

"It's about how you see things and how you get information from things, and how some things in life are hidden from you," says Parsons of his sculptures' defiant muteness. "You never know quite how things work and then you'll never figure it out, maybe. Or you'll have a take on it but you might not get it right."

Invisible City and Gone Fishing both use texts written by blind poet and Massey lecturer Peter Beatson, who is also a trustee of the National Radio Reading Service.

Parsons says Invisible City relates Beatson's physical experience of walking around Wellington.

Another of Parsons' Braille works comes in a transparent bag, rendering the text even more unintelligible for those who might be able to translate it by touch. Parsons says the owner of this piece insisted on knowing the source of the text, also composed by Beatson, but he refused.

"I said, 'It wouldn't actually give you anything. You'd feel let down, I am sure, because the potential of the thing is gone. Suddenly you know what it means and the problem has been solved.'

"I'm not really after solving problems for people and answering questions at all, and I don't really like that idea."

One of Parsons' works at Roger Williams Contemporary is a Braille translation of an eye-test chart, which may seem contradictory and mean but, by overtly denying an easy reading, Parsons wants people to consider their own experience of the physicality of his works. By tantalising us with the suggestion of information without giving it away, we will pay more attention to the forms he uses.

"I have always maintained they should have their own presence and their own life and attract people for their own reasons. And my personality and what I say doesn't have as much to do with it as the work does. That is always the motivation and hence the coding and the lack of meaning ... to deny people getting the back-story.

"It's a matter of tempting people - it's a motivation to make up their own story, really, and not supply the story. Let them dig their own hole or tell me what they think it means. I am trying to get information out of other people, which I find quite interesting."

Parsons' more recent work moves further away from readability by using numbers, sometimes strategically and sometimes completely at random.

Others, including a large piece on Queen St, have intriguing configurations of rods that suggest some sort of electronic code that could be used by a music box or an old punch-card machine. These are still about language and information, but it is less clear if there is any concealed information at all.

"There is a lot about how much is actually in the work; how much people will glean from particular things. I think a lot of what I do is also how people get meaning from new objects or new materials, and how inert you can make it before it stops being meaningful at all."

His intentions may seem antagonistic but there is also a cosmic poetry in his work - of potentially saying a lot and yet saying nothing. His two-panel Braille piece Twin Infinities is made up of opposites - a black panel and a white panel; one with raised dots and the other concave. It is both positive and negative but combined it cancels itself out.

"There is every combination of numbers," he says, referring to one of his numbered works. "There is nothing really there because there are too many variables. So you get lost in this middle ground of having everything and nothing. Too much information gives you nothing.

"That's a nice idea, supplying everything but tempting people not to read it. But they always will, that's the trouble. They always want to know more about where things come from.

"If you spend more time with the work and less time talking about it, sometimes you get better results."


Exhibition

* Who: Anton Parsons
* Where and when: Roger Williams Contemporary, 61 Randolph St, Newton, to Sep 2