Artists

Based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Graham Bennett is recognised as one of New Zealand’s foremost contemporary sculptors. As evident in numerous large-scale public and private commissions in Asia and Australasia, his delicate, enigmatic sculptures address the relationship between people and place.

Through a range of media, including steel, stone, wood, brass and bronze, and on scales both domestic and monumental, Bennett draws on art history, the science laboratory, natural history and the machine workshop to develop a sculptural language that considers the relationship between humanity, identity, environmental sustainability and his ongoing fascination with the mechanisms of measuring, mapping and navigating. Such works have particular reference to the Pacific region and Aotearoa New Zealand as an island nation.

Often complex in design, concept and engineering perspicacity, Bennett uses his work to explore our tenuous relationship with the planet and the warning signs we often choose to ignore. Large scale works similar to those held at Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden have been commissioned for the Gibbs Farm sculpture park in Kaipara Harbour; Connells Bay Sculpture Park on Waiheke Island; Ōhinetahi historic homestead at Governors Bay, Christchurch; Kurashiki city, Japan; and the Haitai Art Valley International Sculpture Park in South Korea.

Bing Dawe’s upbringing in Glenavy, South Canterbury, alongside the Waitaki River, has sustained a life-long interest in, and respect for, the environment. The river’s rich biodiversity and ecosystems and the ways in which humans interact with these delicate and self-sufficient series of relationships continue to inform his work.

Through his sculptural practice, he engages with pressing environmental issues, including the impact of urban development and environmental encroachment on native animals and natural habitats. Fish and birds are particularly favoured motifs and feature in two ongoing series represented in the permanent collection of Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden.

In these fine, superbly crafted works of wood, bronze and steel, he aligns traditional practices of food-gathering with an ongoing legacy of habitat erosion and fishing bycatch in which birds are trapped, snagged, left floundering or washed ashore in a telling yet largely ignored process of “collateral” damage.

Since graduating from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in the mid-1970s, Dawe has had nearly 50 solo exhibitions, participated in numerous group shows and been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Wallace Art Award. His public art commissions are seen in Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua and Christchurch and his works are held in public and private collections across New Zealand and overseas.

Renowned New Zealand sculptor Neil Dawson studied at Canterbury University School of Fine Arts, Christchurch and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Through the production of usually large-scale, site-specific sculptures in New Zealand, Australia, Asia and the United Kingdom, his name has become associated with seemingly fragile, three-dimensional works of laser-cut steel and aluminium that appear to hover, as if momentarily, in the air. Such works include the suspended sculpture Echo (1981) at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, Christchurch; Globe (1989) installed in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Paris; and Ferns 2 (2020) in Wellington’s Civic Square. As with the works in Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden, these works evoke a sense of wonder in their intricate forms, their ephemeral presence and impossible poise. Other major commissions include the Bomber Command war memorial sculpture in Canberra, Australia and Horizons (1994) for Gibbs Farm. His 18-metre work Chalice in Cathedral Square, Christchurch (2001), became a commemorative focal point following the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In more recent years the artist has added smaller, domestic-scale works to his oeuvre, including wall-hung domes and feathers anchored as if in mid-fall in the interior space.

Andrew Drummond is one of New Zealand’s leading kinetic sculptors, exploring the space and parallels between land and body, organic movement and technology.

Born in Nelson in 1951, he obtained his degree in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Since then he has developed an aesthetic language pivoting on the role of artist as, in the words of art curator Jennifer Hay, “provocateur, craftsman, teacher and inventor”.2 Through performance art, installation, video, drawing, photography and sculpture, his practice has given elegant and beguiling form to human relationships with the natural landscape, ecology, technology, cultural history and the processes of environmental change. Across his career, he has developed a unique sculptural language that combines natural materials (including willow, wax, moss, steel, coal and gold) with precision engineering to denote natural and human-made transformation and transactions.

Drummond’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, and the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. He has created a number of outdoor public sculptures, including Tower of Light for the Wellington Sculptural Trust, a seemingly simple yet intriguing device that converts wind speed into light through a series of neon rings lit by the changing force of the wind.

His work has been exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally including in Sydney, Barcelona, Edinburgh, New York City and Paris.

Sculptor Alison Erickson crafts small and large-scale figurative bronzes, most of which are cast in the small foundry in the historic flour mill in Waikari, North Canterbury, where she has lived and worked alongside her partner, fellow sculptor Sam Mahon, since the 1990s. Largely self-taught, her modelling is intuitive and evocative, revealing a fine understanding of human gesture, rhythm and form. The resulting works combine a quiet intimacy with a presence that is powerful and unequivocal in both their poignancy and context.

Erickson exhibits throughout New Zealand. Her sculpture of a family group entitled Winds of Change (2015), outside the Rangiora library, portrays what she describes as refugees of change, a response to the Canterbury earthquakes and the north-westerly wind that rips through the landscape. Looking for something that will last (2019), a mother and child work, stands on a rocky outcrop above Diamond Harbour wharf. As with her works in Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden, such sculptures combine the intimacy of family relations and personal contemplation with an understated but keen concern for environmental issues.

Kaikōura-based artist Ben Foster began his working life as an apprentice furniture-maker, a training ground that would prove invaluable for his future career as an artist. After gaining a visual arts diploma from the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (the Ara Institute of Canterbury), he spent some years travelling overseas before returning to settle in Kaikōura. As he told The Press, “I gave myself five years of working as a furniture maker, and doing art on the side. And as it turns out, by the end of the first year I was 100 percent making art.”3

Since then, Foster has established a broad sculptural practice, including slick, stylised geometric and figurative works, and more sinuous, abstract kinetic sculptures. The reflective surfaces of polished or enamel-coated aluminium or stainless steel, and angled or sinuous forms mirror the dramatic surroundings of the seaward Kaikōura Ranges and the sea, echoing the movement of light, water and wind in this wild, coastal landscape. The resulting works have a strong sense of dynamism and tactility, reflecting both literally and figuratively the ever-changing environment.

Foster has exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Spain and Hong Kong. His works are held in private collections in New Zealand and abroad.

Natalie Guy obtained a Diploma in Fine Art from Otago Polytechnic in 1986 and furthered her art education at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and then at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, where she was awarded a PhD in 2022.

Her artworks respond to, and build on, pre-existing images and forms from art, art history, urban planning and architecture – a potent and constant keeper, she believes, of social memory. Building on these historical (usually modernist) cues, her work destabilises a straightforward reading of both the source and the new work.

Using found objects, bronze, glass and wood, she reconfigures the simplicity of her materials to evoke a conceptually complex memory of modernity in New Zealand art, architecture and culture.

Guy has been the recipient of several awards and residencies in New Zealand, Australia, India and New York. Her work is held in a number of public collections in New Zealand, including at Christchurch City Council; Waikato Museum, Hamilton; The Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland; and Woollahra Council, Sydney.

Christchurch artist Sam Harrison obtained his Bachelor of Art and Design from the School of Art and Design at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (now Ara) in 2006. Shortly after graduating, he had his first solo show at CoCA, the Centre of Contemporary Art, in Christchurch. Since then, he has exhibited throughout New Zealand and Australia.

Across a range of media, Harrison has revealed an extraordinary proficiency in the depiction of the human form, in sculpture, drawing and woodblock printmaking. Whether drawn from biblical stories or the contemporary art studio, his figurative forms, both human and animal, reveal a deeply personal appreciation of the body and art history’s long engagement with this form. As art critic John Hurrell wrote, “His bronze or plaster sculptures of the human body make us think about this corporeal stuff we lug around with us… Like Jenny Saville or Lucien Freud he reminds us of the meat and bone we have as baggage.”

Harrison has won major commissions, both public and private in Australia and is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Ōtautahi Christchurch-based Tony O'Grady has been a practicing artist for over 35 years. Throughout his career, he has painted and sculpted, working across a range of media. Early works included large-scale commissions in concrete but more recently he has favoured stone, wood, and bronze.

O’Grady's passion lies in the tactile art of sculpting, particularly in the intricate craft of carving. This ardour is evident in his adept exploration of concepts like mass, weight, balance, and the complex interplay between positive and negative space. These artistic investigations imbue his sculptures with a profoundly personal and spiritual essence.

While his sculptures are figurative, he also explores abstraction, as seen in his treatment of both human and bird forms. O’Grady writes, “I am always wanting to create powerful, monumental feeling work, no matter what the size. I hope my work shows something unique and uplifting.” He finds inspiration in the legacies of modernist sculptors Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi.

O’Grady has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and shares his expertise by instructing stone sculpture in engaging summer workshops.

Of Ngāpuhi and early European descent, Mandy Cherry Joass graduated from the University of Canterbury with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture in 2015. Since then she has used her art to bring together aspects of mātauranga Māori and postcolonial identity through the practice of raranga (weaving).

Joass translates traditional Māori imagery, techniques and materials through the medium of recycled aluminium venetian blinds, literally weaving together traditional knowledge with a ubiquitous modernist housing material. Lightweight, airy and curvilinear, the resulting works can be read as the effective reuse of discardable materials and a metaphor for European conventions of privacy in contrast to more traditional communal ways of living.

Annabel Menzies-Joyce gained a Diploma of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury (1978) and a post-graduate Diploma of Landscape Architecture from Lincoln University (1980). In the mid-2000s, she moved from painting on canvas to the technically demanding process of casting glass. She also utilises the pate de verre method, another form of kiln casting using crushed glass mixed with a binding material.

A keen tramper, the natural environment is her primary source of inspiration. Found bones and animal skulls are cast and mounted to draw attention to the fragile beauty of everyday fauna and the threats to their ecosystems. Her larger triangular works stand as glacial blue pyramids, again inspired by the raw beauty, and vulnerability, of the physical landscape.

American-born sculptor Doug Neil immigrated to Christchurch with his wife and son in 1990. His stone sculptures, both domestic and megalithic in scale, reflect what he calls an old-fashioned truth to materials. Cut, ground, grooved and etched, his large blocks of granite or volcanic basalt are transformed into totemic sculptures, raw in their materiality, but symbolic too of prehistoric uses of stone in the landscape for aesthetic or spiritual purposes. The resulting works, writes Melissa Reimer, “are a beautiful reconciliation between Neil’s vision and labour, and nature itself. In both rural and urban settings, his great rocks lend their surroundings a sense of timelessness that is both comforting and awe-inspiring.”

In addition to Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden, Neil’s work can be seen at Ōhinetahi at Governor’s Bay, at the entrances to the Christchurch City Mission and Westburn Primary School, and in the Seattle Sister City Garden in Halswell Quarry, also in Ōtautahi Christchurch. His work is also held in private collections around the world. In 2003, Neil won the Japan Culture Foundation sculpture competition with his monumental work Pillars of Wisdom. As Neil wrote for Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden in 2014, seven years before his retirement in 2021, “Mostly, I feel honoured to be working every day out in the paddock between the green and gold hedgerows, under the soaring hawks and fields of pheasants, plovers, quail and pukekos. They make great friends in my studio.”

Ōtautahi Christchurch artist Pauline Rhodes is one of New Zealand’s leading site-specific installation artists. Since graduating in Sculpture at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts in 1974, she has made works, for both outdoor and gallery contexts, that challenge conventional representations of the landscape in New Zealand and traditional sculptural practice. Across sculpture, performance, installation, drawing and photography, she explores ideas around place, material, ecology, permanence and transience in order, wrote Christina Barton in 2002, “to focus on the materiality of art, on process, context, questions of meaning, problems of representation, and the nature of the artist and the nature of the viewer as sentient beings and as social subjects”.5

Through a sophisticated language of forms, processes and natural or industrial materials, Rhodes renders in fragile, seemingly impermanent forms ideas around our maritime connections, our relationship to the land and the human experience of our environment through space and time.

Danny Summers is the son of Llew Summers (1947–2019), who was a dear friend of the owners and an important instigator in the inception of Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden. Based in Oxford, Danny has worked with copper, timber and, more recently, stone. Drawn by the name of the sculpture and its jaunty figure, Peter and Annabel purchased Peter at Sculpture on the Peninsula, Loudon Farm, Teddington in 2011.

Llew Summers’ career spanned nearly 50 years, numerous exhibitions and commissions, and about 900 works in wood, bronze, concrete, marble, cast glass and terracotta. Although he had no formal academic training, he learned to make moulds and to cast modelled clay works in concrete with Rodney Newton Broad, a friend and University of Canterbury arts student. A prodigious and conscientious artist and arts mentor to many, Summers’ work reveals a strong intuitive response to his subject and a celebration of the human form. Some of these are small domestic-scale works; others are monumental, more than two metres in height, yet still conjuring a remarkable sense of movement, flight and human joie de vivre. Holding true to the long tradition of the nude, at a time when abstraction was the norm in public art, his work invariably caused controversy – as well as fierce support – in his home city. Following a formative overseas trip in 1999, his work began to display a more overtly spiritual content. By the time he died in his home in Mt Pleasant on 1 August 2019, his outdoor works were represented in public spaces throughout New Zealand as well as in private collections in Australia, USA, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden and Finland.

Marté Szirmay was born in Budapest and immigrated to New Zealand in 1957, aged 11. She graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland School of Fine Arts in 1968 and attained a teaching diploma shortly after.

She became part of a new generation of New Zealand sculptors working with abstract forms. As she writes, “I aim to create a language of signs and symbols that transcend regional, cultural and social limitations”.

Such works are often conceptualised in terms of devices for healing, meditation and contemplation. Many are based on organic forms such as shells, eggs, seed pods, bones and fossils, trees and fern fronds. Whether they be small intimate works or large architectural and civic pieces, such as the almost eight-metre high Yantra for Mahana (2006)at Woollaston Estate in Nelson, the resulting forms are made to walk around, under or through; admired from a distance or close up. Over the past five decades, Szirmay has held numerous solo exhibitions within New Zealand and participated in group exhibitions in London, Budapest, Helsinki, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Sweden, Crete, Spain and Australia.

Born in Christchurch, sculptor Johnny Turner has studios in both Wellington and Gisborne. He uses the hardness and weight of volcanic and metamorphic rock to build forms enmeshed in classical history, indigenous mythology and the Japanese aesthetic. This transforms the natural mass and hardness of stone into elegant, evocative works that highlight the soft textures and tactile surfaces of each piece. Having lived for much of his life in coastal cities, many of his works allude to the history of migration, seafaring, place-marking and our nature as islanders, anchored in this place but forever looking seawards. Turner studied art history at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, an experience, he says, that gave him “heroes, movements, working practices, theories and critiques to follow”. Turner’s work has been recognised through numerous awards and symposiums in New Zealand, USA, France, Germany and Russia.

Christchurch-based artist Robyn Webster was drawn to harakeke while living on the shores of the Hokianga Harbour in the late 1970s. She trained in harakeke weaving (raranga) under renowned practitioners Heeni Kerekere in Nelson and, later, Emily Schuster at the Institute of Māori Arts and Crafts, Whakarewarewa, before graduating with Honours in Sculpture from Otago Art School in 1993.

Since then, she has exhibited throughout New Zealand, exploring ways to integrate hand building techniques into her sculptural practice using discarded plastics, harakeke, wool and other natural fibres, guided by Māori tikanga processes of gathering and tending. Webster also collaborated with researchers at the Biopolymer Network and AgResearch at Lincoln University in exploring the use of sustainable harakeke fibre as an alternative to glass in fibreglass. Fuelled by a constant shifting between two and three dimensions, she has recently been bringing finger weaving processes into printmaking. She has also explored performance, installation and film, collaborating with writers, musicians, choreographers and dancers to activate her harakeke installations/environments.

Across her work, Webster balances natural fibre and man-made materials, the precious and the valueless, through the use of traditionally feminine craft practices such as weaving, plaiting and stitching.

British-born Matthew Williams began working with timber when he was just 16 years old. For several years he studied as a model maker, further expanding his interest in design and construction. After working in London for several years, then Dubai, Williams moved to New Zealand in 2008. Now based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, his passion for form and design is expressed through a range of materials, including timber, granite, bronze and steel. Many of his pieces are kinetic but even those that are not, such as this work, reveal in their strong lines and sweeping curves a dynamic sense of imminent movement.

Williams’ work is shown in galleries and at outdoor sculpture events throughout the country. His work is held in collections in Dubai, the UK, Canada and New Zealand, and is also sold through The Kauri Museum in Northland. While continuing to develop his own artistic practice, Williams also runs a foundry in Christchurch, casting work for other sculptors including Bing Dawe, Alison Erickson, Sam Harrison and Natalie Guy, all represented at Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden.