Vulcan Lane installation a real mud-slinger

By ANDREW CLIFFORD

Anyone hesitating as they walked up Vulcan Lane last Thursday night would have wondered what strange late-night activities a team of labourers was undertaking on one of Auckland's oldest pubs.

Strangely, the facade of the Queens Ferry (now the Counting House) was spattered with clay but, even more curiously, the workers scurrying ant-like in and out of the historic building's upper windows and hanging from climbing ropes weren't part of a clean-up crew. They were responsible for its systematic transformation into a three-storey piece of pottery.

Leading the team is artist John Radford, who refers to the activity as transplasticism, defined as "the transformation of the appearance of an object with a hand-applied covering which changes in plasticity".

The transplastic project was launched at last year's AK03 festival, where a variety of retro vehicles, including a scooter and an old bus, were transplasticised and installed on Auckland streets, much to the consternation of parking wardens.

His Transplastic Buildingis the culmination of this stage of the ongoing project and is Radford's most ambitious work.

Radford is no stranger to clambering about the tops of old Auckland buildings. In the mid-80s, through fast-talking construction workers or by stealth, he fossicked through many of Auckland's grand marked-for-demolition buildings.

It was a period when developers were indiscriminately bulldozing large tracts of Auckland's architectural history to make way for faceless glass towers.

Armed with a sketchbook, a camera and obsessive research, he fought this reckless eradication of our heritage by documenting what are now long-lost gems of New Zealand's hybrid, late-19th-century architecture, then interpreting their ornate facades and cluttered signage into sculpture and painting.

Radford's father was a potter, so he started messing with clay when he was young. After working as a signwriter, advertising gofer, and even a brief stint flipping burgers, he became disillusioned with the creative shackles of working in the corporate world and turned to art.

He carved a singular career path from the outset and is largely self-taught after declining a place at Elam School of Fine Arts. For the sake of independence, he has avoided dealer galleries and is now, literally, outside galleries completely.

Most of his recent work takes the form of outdoor public sculpture, and he is collaborating on the design of a public artwork for Panmure with fellow artist Yuk King Tan.

Radford's best-know works are the three Tip sculptures emerging from the grassy banks of Western Park on Ponsonby Rd. Like his earlier works, they are ghosts of Auckland-past and are derived from the architectural details of destroyed buildings.

Interestingly, he has resurrected only the tops of these buildings, highlighting the ornamentation we seldom notice as we scurry around the city.

Only the busiest of inner-city commuters could have failed to notice the spectacle Radford created on Vulcan Lane. By Friday morning, when the clay-covering was complete and the climbing gear removed, the clay was drying, cracking and tumbling on to the footpath. The tavern's outdoor umbrellas were used to shelter patrons from falling dirt.

Occasionally, a pedestrian would stoop to retrieve an intact fragment. Others would pause to poke and pick at this apparition, a reaction Radford enjoys. He encourages interaction with his work and likes producing work that does not need a Do Not Touch sign.

He employs the tactility of moist clay as a means to combat the viewer's usually detached relationship with art, and is ecstatic with the countless fingerprints that appeared all over his AK03 vehicles.

The transience of his present work is what interests him most. From start to finish, the Transplastic Building is in a state of flux, finishing when the last lump of clay falls from the wall, albeit helped by a cleaning crew.

This reflects a broader, more philosophical outlook in his work, which evokes the constant re-negotiation mankind makes to co-exist with nature.

It is also a reminder of how fragile our occupation of this planet can be. Anyone who has had to pull weeds from the most inhospitable of urban crevices, or tried to rid their high-rise inner-city apartment of ants, will testify to the planet's resilience.

Similarly, Radford sees the transplastic project as a "momentary reversal of human material, culture dominating the land". It is a reversal he encountered on a 2002 trip to Venice, where he saw history flaking off the walls, like the clay falling from the pub.

Since the transplastic project began last year, New Zealand has also seen towns caked in mud as flooding rivers re-forge their own paths. Meanwhile, Mt Ruapehu's crater lake is threatening to send a muddy lahar into the Whangaehu Valley.

Most people are fortunate to only experience these events through news photos and film. Fittingly, Radford has extensive video and photographic documentation of his fleeting installations, which he plans to incorporate into future exhibitions, perpetuating the transplastic process.