Retracing the steps of New Zealand sculpture

A definitive history of sculpture in New Zealand traces a nation in search of its own identity. Arts editor LINDA HERRICK talks to the book's author, Michael Dunn.

Three men were brought to New Zealand from England in the mid-1920s, hired to teach sculpture as a branch of technical education. Francis Shurrock was sent to Christchurch, Robert Field to Dunedin, and William Wright to Auckland. All three had London Royal College of Art diplomas, and all three might have had high expectations of their neo-colonial home on the other side of the world.

Instead Field discovered he had just five students, and the "art school" was in a room at the top of three flights of stairs. Shurrock had to teach sculpture to children as well as "mature students" in a cramped room, and much the same happened to Wright in Auckland's Elam Art School. Amazingly, they stuck it out, unsung heroes in the story of New Zealand's fledgling artistic development.

"They came out to an awful environment," says Professor Michael Dunn, head of Elam and author of the newly released New Zealand Sculpture: A History (Auckland University Press), the first truly comprehensive study of the art form in this country from early colonial times to the present day.

"They were virtually outcasts - the one person teaching sculpture in each of those cities and separated by bad roads and a troublesome railway line. They had no contact with the outside world and they had to work to a standard."

Dunn knows how hard it was for them: he met Field and Shurrock before they died (in 1977 and 1987 respectively; Wright died in 1943), "and that was very helpful for me in getting the feeling of what it was like for them, how difficult it was".

"When I first started thinking about their teaching, I thought they were teaching classes like we have here at the university but oh no, they had a very mixed bag - little kids of 12 or 13 who went there instead of ordinary school because they were no good at class, and the older people who came along were like we would have now for adult education classes."

The book has been a five-year project for Dunn, who spent three years writing it, another year fine-tuning and the final year asking as many sculptors as were still alive to check the content for accuracy.

As with his earlier books, A Concise History of New Zealand Painting and Contemporary Painting in New Zealand, he is aware it will be used as a teaching and reference tool.

"A lot of academic writing about the arts is impossible to read," he says, "but I don't believe in that approach. Every paragraph has been refined to make it easy to read but still retain the academic quality."

To read the book is to read a history of New Zealand as it grew from a British outpost clinging to the customs and cultures of the mother country, and matured into today's vibrant Pacific nation asserting an identity which belongs to us and no one else.

As Dunn's book tells it, from 1860 until the turn of the century sculpture occurred in the form of masonry and decorative carving either imported from Britain or Europe or crafted here by immigrants.

It was very much a case of recreating a little slice of England: hence Larnach Castle in Dunedin, the Supreme Court (now the High Court) at Auckland, with its carved heads, the Canterbury Provincial Government Buildings, and grand post offices up and down the land.

Then came the commissioned - and imported - pompous monuments and statuary of pioneer figures such as the 1901 marble of Sir George Grey, created by Francis Williamson, sculptor to Queen Victoria, who placed a block covered with Maori design behind Grey's body. "This lifeless travesty of Maori woodcarving demonstrates the gulf between the two cultures," writes Dunn. " ... the lowly position of the carving can now suggest subordination and conquest of the Maori."

In 1922 the statue of Grey was moved from Grey's Ave in Auckland to Albert Park, where it has been attacked by activists and vandals ever since; his head was lopped off on Waitangi Day, 1987.

"Everything in the early days was controlled very much by the British viewpoint, the British standards of taste and values, and that was widespread right throughout society," Dunn explains. "The statue of Sir George Grey was provocative as an enduring monument to a person who represented values many Maori are uncomfortable with."

Art schools opened in New Zealand in the 1880s (Elam in 1890), with the syllabus modelled on the English programme and rudimentary attention paid to the teaching of sculpture.

But important works were nevertheless created which said things about New Zealand: Nelson Illingworth's The Signing of the Deed of Sale of Lake Wairarapa to the Crown (1911), a beaten bronze panel which is housed in Te Papa, and Allen Hutchinson's plaster-cast Old Woman, Te Arawa (1900).

Before World War I, Dunn points out, "It was the age of the expatriates" for many literary and artistic people "who could not develop their art in the closed colonial environment". And after the war, the erection of memorials dominated the practice of sculpture - again, always figurative and always modelled on British practice.

Conservatism was rife and "movements such as Impressionism were regarded with open scepticism or disbelief by New Zealanders long after the turn of the century," writes Dunn.

But his book highlights an exciting postwar discovery who deserves more attention: Margaret Butler, a club-footed West Coaster who studied in Wellington at the School of Design, created some remarkable modernist work (some of which is in Te Papa), and left to study in Paris in 1923 at the age of 38.

She returned to Wellington in 1934 and concentrated on studying Maori figures but languished in obscurity and "was almost forgotten when she died in 1947", writes Dunn.

Another world war, and the visual arts were growing stronger in New Zealand but the problem of identity remained. "The freeing of sculpture from its almost total bondage to British academic principles was not easy to accomplish ... the ideas of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth ... emerged with overwhelming strength after the war," says Dunn in the chapter on sculpture from 1945 to 1965.

"Yes, Moore cast a very long shadow," Dunn confirms. "One of the sub-themes in the book is the gradual breaking down of the British influence. Moore was still there from 1945 onwards as a very dominant figure, and then we had the 1956 Moore exhibition here.

"To get away from that influence was extremely difficult - it didn't mean our sculptors couldn't do worthwhile work, but even in Britain it wasn't until the development of modernist constructive sculpture made out of steel, and so on, that people were able to put Moore behind them."

Dominant figures during this period were Molly Macalister and Alison Duff, and Alan Ingham and Jim Allen, all pupils of Francis Shurrock and proponents of a significantly modern style, albeit sometimes strongly reminiscent of Moore.

A landmark was passed when the Auckland City Art Gallery held an exhibition of contemporary New Zealand sculpture in June 1955. Innovative enough in itself, says Dunn, but "that enough contemporary sculpture could be gathered to fill an entire room ... was unprecedented".

The sense of New Zealand artists finding their own way really starts to come through from the 1960s, with Paul Beadle, Greer Twiss, Terry Stringer and Paul Dibble leading the field in figurative work, while the work of Don Driver, Marte Szirmay, Len Lye and Peter Nicholls delved into groundbreaking multi-media abstraction.

As with many of the later artists, Dunn knew Beadle well and gives a strong sense of his personality in the book. "Paul Beadle was a fabulous person. He was head of Elam when I came here as a student and I think he was possibly one of the stimuluses behind the book. He was very active as a sculptor doing marvellous bronzes and there was so much pleasure you could see coming from him."

"Pleasure" was not necessarily a word one would associate with another important period documented: the dreaded (by many) "Post-Object and Conceptual Art" from 1969 on. This included "environmental art, happenings and time-based things" - often events which demanded audience participation, left no trace when they were over, could be ugly and confronting, and had no monetary value.

Jim Allen was an important player in this movement at Elam, says Dunn, who was studying at Auckland University's art history department in the early 70s.

"It was a bizarre period and it's never been properly written up. The people who've written about it were the sort of people who write gobbledegook you can't read. It was certainly a hard period to document because many of them left nothing behind, but I had the advantage that I lived through it. It was a movement that criticised what everyone else had been doing but it didn't subvert it entirely. The other work continued."

An important function of Dunn's book is to take a long look at contemporary Maori sculptors, who have had their own struggles. He reveals how Arnold Wilson, who completed a fine arts diploma with honours in Elam in 1953, was treated.

"Elam was a monocultural institution whose teachers consistently ignored and denied the value of traditional Maori carving," he writes. "On one occasion the director, Archie Fisher, told Wilson that if he wanted to make Maori art he should live in a hut and wear a grass skirt."

How does Dunn know this? "He told me! I interviewed him. That's what they had to put up with. Even when I came into Elam as head in 1994, we had only just brought in the Maori art programme. A lot of Maori felt alienated from Elam; it was a European-focused school.

"The older artists, like Cliff Whiting, Fred Graham, Selwyn Muru, Para Matchitt and so on, mainly started with a teaching background and were able to get into art training through teaching. They began with their own cultural support and then moved into contemporary expression."

Those pioneers, now so wonderfully dominant in many public sculptures, paved the way for the likes of Robert Jahnke, Brett Graham, Michael Parekowhai, Jacqueline Fraser and Maureen Lander, whose work uses modern techniques and materials to express issues of cultural identity.

Dunn's final chapter shows how far New Zealand sculptors have come since those early Brit-bound days. Many have an international profile and many are linked by their concern with the natural world, environmental issues and conservation.

"Contemporary sculpture has a diversity and scope not seen before in New Zealand's history ... it has become possible for artists to make a living by obtaining significant commissions locally and internationally," says Dunn. "The outstanding achievements of young Maori sculptors highlight the depth of New Zealand art today ... it can be confidently predicted sculpture will continue to develop as an established part of the country's multicultural profile."