Piano
1976 In the fifth and final year of art school we had been placed in the care of Alexander Mackie College of Fine Arts. The College had serious teething troubles. It had bought equipment but had no spaces for making sculpture. A teacher at St George TAFE, Bill Horton, had a shed in his back yard in Annandale and said if I fixed it up I could use it for a studio. It had been a plating works so there was a lot of damage. I replaced timber in the frame and roof, iron on the roof and walls and laid a brick floor. I bought an angle grinder and G clamps and brought my welder in. Blank canvas! What would I make? A thing that has deep importance for me is the family piano. It was a Beale and bought by my great grandparents for my mother and her siblings. My mother had wanted to be a dancer but that was deemed unseemly so she was given piano lessons. She attained the level of LLB (not sure what that means). She stopped playing once she had reached that level. She did not want us to take lessons. I could read music to a very basic level and regularly played a number of pieces that were therapeutic for me if not melodious for any listeners. I still have the piano. Music, piano music and the piano are all inexplicably important to me. A sense of material is likewise. The sculpture could be a rack for stacking bricks but roughly in the form of a piano. Two meanings and roughly satisfying. |
Dover
How do you name a sculpture? After art school we rented a block of land owned by Harry Georgeson’s father at Rossmore. We built a tin shed to work in and a small amenity shed that functioned as a bathroom and kitchen so we could live out there. I started making a few sculptures, basically frames, but nothing satisfying. I was working for Ron Robertson Swann and he had bought an oxy cutter that allowed cutting of very thick steel. I was cutting up thick pieces of mass. Rossmore was a very cold place in winter and we had a kerosene heater for some warmth in the tin shed at night. I decided I would make a sculpture of the heater. It became a very heavy little sculpture with lumps of steel and had some presence. I exhibited it in a group show at Gallery A. They rang me up and asked me what it was called but I had not thought of a name. Names never seemed important. Our fixed line phone was in the corner of our dining room which also had our bookshelves. I looked at the shelves and the first book that jumped out was published by Dover, an interesting publishing house but I cannot remember which particular book. This is how a sculpture gets its name. |
Barrell
1977
My friend Ross Fackerell had bought a steam engine that had run a saw mill on a property outside Condoblin. He then bought an old semi-trailer to transport it to Kyneton in Victoria. I offered to give him a hand and that story is much longer but when I came back I wanted to make something to commemorate this epic journey. Steam is a fascination and so I started to make a boiler. ‘Barrel’ was the outcome. When Harry Nicolson saw it, he said it looked like a fallen Greek column. What you think something is about is not necessarily what people will see. Amen!
1977
My friend Ross Fackerell had bought a steam engine that had run a saw mill on a property outside Condoblin. He then bought an old semi-trailer to transport it to Kyneton in Victoria. I offered to give him a hand and that story is much longer but when I came back I wanted to make something to commemorate this epic journey. Steam is a fascination and so I started to make a boiler. ‘Barrel’ was the outcome. When Harry Nicolson saw it, he said it looked like a fallen Greek column. What you think something is about is not necessarily what people will see. Amen!
Fireplace
I have lived my life in the gig economy long before it was common and had that name. I have earned a living in untold ways but at one stage I was the restorer and installer of marble fireplaces. These fireplaces are total façade. I tried to make the structure of a façade. |
Kite
Jan, my wife, rented an old house out of Wollombi. We used to go up there for breaks when we could. It took about two and a half hours driving in those days. We went up one Easter, however, there had been heavy rains and when we finally got to the entrance it was already dark and the creek on that side of the road was running fast and well over its banks. There was no-way we could get across in the little Mazda so we turned around and drove all the way back home. In random discussions on the way home we had discussed kites. The next day we decided we would make a kite, but a round one. It did sort of fly but needed much more than a zephyr to stay up. I then made a steel kite, one that would have remained grounded in a cyclone. |
Three Wise Men
1977
Again, my wife had a book called, ‘The Story of the Three Wise Men’. It used photographs from the church in Autun, France, of carvings done by Giselbertus, famous for being one of the earliest masons to sign his work. It was not till 1980 that I got to see the real thing which is wonderful. The inspiration was the three men sleeping. A friend Piers Laverty had given me some lengths of steel 100mm x 100mm by about two metres long. I cut these up plus some other thick steel I had and made the three heads and the six feet. I then wanted a covering for the bodies. At the bottom of our street in Lilyfied was a company called Bagnalls who specialised in rolling and bending steel. They bent a sheet of steel into an elongated U section which fitted perfectly. I have gone back to this subject a number of times.
1977
Again, my wife had a book called, ‘The Story of the Three Wise Men’. It used photographs from the church in Autun, France, of carvings done by Giselbertus, famous for being one of the earliest masons to sign his work. It was not till 1980 that I got to see the real thing which is wonderful. The inspiration was the three men sleeping. A friend Piers Laverty had given me some lengths of steel 100mm x 100mm by about two metres long. I cut these up plus some other thick steel I had and made the three heads and the six feet. I then wanted a covering for the bodies. At the bottom of our street in Lilyfied was a company called Bagnalls who specialised in rolling and bending steel. They bent a sheet of steel into an elongated U section which fitted perfectly. I have gone back to this subject a number of times.
Head
One of my occupations was part-time teaching at East Sydney. This included teaching modelling, usually a head. Something that struck me was the tendency of students not to appreciate how far heads are cantilevered from the spine. I tried to make the structure of this cantilever. |
Gate
Because we were regularly burgled at Lilyfield, (about once a year for 13 years) I built a new back gate. I then of course built a sculpture of the gate. What is not seen in a gate, that is crucial, is what happens underground. It had a good sort of rhythm. |
Bender A silly subject but somehow machines don’t look to me like the feeling I have of what they actually do. I tried to make something that showed what I felt happened in a bender. Tried but failed, however, they were slightly weird objects and I do seem to be attracted to a kind of weirdness. |
Scissors
1977
How do you express the essence of scissors? Sliding, sheering with precision and determination.
1977
How do you express the essence of scissors? Sliding, sheering with precision and determination.
Vice
You may see a theme developing here. This was how I saw the forces in a vice which was a necessary tool. Ladder
New York was a fantastic, life changing, experience but also an emotionally tempestuous time. I made a lot of sculptures at the school. I rationalised that the purpose of the ladder was to help me climb out of the mess. It didn’t achieve that but making did take me out of myself for a while. Bill Tucker kept the ladder but goodness knows what happened to it. Lion
After New York, Jan and I flew to London where we stayed for about three weeks drinking more Galleries, Museums and sites. We then hired a campervan and spent three months driving through Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Greece visiting every gallery, museum and site we possibly could. An educational grand tour that changed me. When we were in England we visited the St Martins school where two of our teachers had spent time. An exercise had been set to make a lion like the many that decorate entrances around the world. I decide to give myself the same exercise. It included parts from various projects including a stabiliser for a crane. |
Joint
I also made a sculpture, thinking about what I missed in Australia. Keyring
(no photo yet) I won a Marten Bequest so in September 1978 I started a year at the New York Studio School. I was famous for losing my keys. I went down to Canal Street and bought a brass, double ended spring clip. It revolutionised my key carrying and eliminated my key losses. I still use the key ring 40 years later. I memorialised this object with a sculpture too. Arch
As a stonemason, working for my father, I was particularly interested in the architecture. While travelling I realised that for any arch to be structurally sound, you must be able to draw a catenary through it. Romanesque, Gothic, Arabic; the silhouette was irrelevant as long as the catenary was there. I was a bit fixated with this so when I came back to Sydney I made my catenary brick arch which was very stable despite depending only on compression between the bricks. Not a sculpture but a necessary thing to do. I also made about five collations of steel arches in various configurations but they were terrible sculptures. |
Tristram (left) and Uncle Toby (right)
This idea of the catenary led me to start making things upside down. This is illustrated in the Gaudi Museum. Our great mentor, Ian McKay, would frequently get to a place in a sculpture where he would simply push it over and then start with a new view point. I consciously started working upside down knowing I would, at some stage, turn it the other way up and then play till happy. It was a refreshing way to work, starting out was a bit like building a rubble wall. Naming never made much sense so I started calling sculptures after the book I happened to be reading. In this case it was the wonderful Tristram Shandy by Sterne. Of three Irish writers, ‘Sterne was wild, Wilde was swift and Swift was stern.’
This idea of the catenary led me to start making things upside down. This is illustrated in the Gaudi Museum. Our great mentor, Ian McKay, would frequently get to a place in a sculpture where he would simply push it over and then start with a new view point. I consciously started working upside down knowing I would, at some stage, turn it the other way up and then play till happy. It was a refreshing way to work, starting out was a bit like building a rubble wall. Naming never made much sense so I started calling sculptures after the book I happened to be reading. In this case it was the wonderful Tristram Shandy by Sterne. Of three Irish writers, ‘Sterne was wild, Wilde was swift and Swift was stern.’
Boat
I also made a boat. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Another way of escaping maybe but I do have a fear of water so I was never likely to use it. Levy
It was named after Lévi-Strauss of ‘Totemism’ and ‘Triste Tropiques’ but bears no relationship to the contents of those books, however, I think it was the best of that bunch. |
Cricket
Instead of being linear I started making sculpture with planes and usually bent ones. This was the first and the biggest. It was a result of my painting envy. I had been powerfully absorbed by Pollocks paintings in New York and though these sculptures were nothing like Pollocks and certainly nowhere near his league they had the physical front. My favourite Pollock is Lavender Mist, a smaller one of his paintings, in sculpture you need to get off the ground. This was called cricket because it was made over the summer when the only thing on ABC radio was, for me, the boring cricket. I made ‘Cycle’, ‘Sennett’, after Richard Sennett’s ‘Fall of Public Man,’ and ‘Seventy’ for Halleluiah. MILC
This was based on a set of wire strainers for tensioning wire fences. Jan’s mother and I really struggled till a few years before she died. MILC is an acronym for mother-in-law’s curse. |
Beget
I had a crisis of confidence I guess. What’s it all about and such. Making the large sculptures had been slow and cumbersome. They were all taking a lot of time and involved many practical problems. They didn’t have the freedom I wanted. One day I went into the shed and started using the plywood I had for making crates and off cuts and just started constructing as quickly as I could joining pieces with self-tappers. Cutting shapes with a jig saw. Beget was the result. I grew fonder and fonder of it over the years until I finally had to dismantle it. |
Onesuch
I worked like this for quite a while and made a number of sculptures. I hired The Performance Space and had a show of them all. |
Leaping The National Museum in Athens is an Aladdin’s Cave for sculptors. Something that stuck in my mind was the ‘horse and jockey’, despite not being the greatest work there. An attempt to show speed and movement in an art form that is generally static. This was my slightly abstracted attempt to do something similar without the image. This wasn’t the first sculpture I had made about an art work but as a subject they certainly fit the bill for being something significant in my life. |
South
Believe it or not this is also a boat or at least about a boat. We had been travelling across America in 1983. There was little coverage of the America’s Cup but the last we heard before landing in Arizona and driving through the desert was that the Australians were losing. We eventually made it to Los Angeles and as we were boarding a ferry I overheard two crewmen talking. In a very displeased tone one told the other, ‘The aussies won’. Not a good place to express any pleasure. A piece of parochialism.
Believe it or not this is also a boat or at least about a boat. We had been travelling across America in 1983. There was little coverage of the America’s Cup but the last we heard before landing in Arizona and driving through the desert was that the Australians were losing. We eventually made it to Los Angeles and as we were boarding a ferry I overheard two crewmen talking. In a very displeased tone one told the other, ‘The aussies won’. Not a good place to express any pleasure. A piece of parochialism.
Kalang
In 1985 Jan discovered she was pregnant. I was teaching at St George when she came out to give me some news. I climbed onto a box to pick some mulberries for her, fell and broke a rib. This made making sculpture a bit harder so I adapted an old pipe bender to let me keep working. This was the best result of that time. For an unknown reason I named it after the property my father rented to do his stone work, ‘Kalang’. I later learnt that this was aboriginal, meaning welcome or beautiful. Appropriate for our new resident to be. |
Stone Seat 'Gog'
After Sophie was born it was difficult to get out to Rossmore which was an hour drive each way. I worked in the back yard and since I couldn’t weld I did some carving, including this stone seat with a cantilever and counterbalance. The stone is from the quarry at Pyrmont. Unfortunately, it is not very comfortable. With its other stone counterpart, it now guards an entrance gate and they are called Gog and Magog. |
Tuggeranong
This was my one and only public commission. The brief was for the Tuggeranong Bus Depot. There was a budget for art but the architect had to introduce some function to get it approved. There are strong winds that hit the site. The sculpture was supposed to break up the wind and reduce its force. The roof of the building was supported by conical concrete columns of different heights. The formwork for these were made out of steel. Once the pour was completed these were redundant so the idea was to incorporate them in the Wind Turbulator. I consulted a wind engineer who explained how these shapes caused turbulence at the edges. I also consulted with structural engineers to make sure they would survive the wind forces and not fatigue. The trick was that as you drove towards them they would align to form the shapes you see below but before and after that they would separate into standing posts as in the photo above. This took six months more than full time with the assistance of Martin Sims. I made money but felt I had been manufacturing rather than making sculpture. I have never been back. They planted trees around it so it is most probably invisible now anyway.
This was my one and only public commission. The brief was for the Tuggeranong Bus Depot. There was a budget for art but the architect had to introduce some function to get it approved. There are strong winds that hit the site. The sculpture was supposed to break up the wind and reduce its force. The roof of the building was supported by conical concrete columns of different heights. The formwork for these were made out of steel. Once the pour was completed these were redundant so the idea was to incorporate them in the Wind Turbulator. I consulted a wind engineer who explained how these shapes caused turbulence at the edges. I also consulted with structural engineers to make sure they would survive the wind forces and not fatigue. The trick was that as you drove towards them they would align to form the shapes you see below but before and after that they would separate into standing posts as in the photo above. This took six months more than full time with the assistance of Martin Sims. I made money but felt I had been manufacturing rather than making sculpture. I have never been back. They planted trees around it so it is most probably invisible now anyway.