Culture
My friend the wind
by Sally Blundell
Why has Wellington gone crazy for public art?
The air space above Wellington’s Post Office Square is about to go live. At the end of this month brilliant blue tangles of light will shimmy up into the night sky like the electrified wake of a spacecraft.
Poised between seven 11m-high stainless-steel poles, they will form an unearthly waymark of glass and argon gas visible from the city, the sea and the harbour.
Like neon, argon gas “is light you can physically put into space”, says New Zealand-born, London-based sculptor Bill Culbert. “Usually it is flat, two-dimensional, but this spirals out. It is fragile, ethereal – almost not there.”
Bill Culbert is in Christchurch, recovering from a 24-hour direct flight from London and overseeing the evolution of his “SkyBlues” sculpture from pencil drawings to a coiling skein of fine glass tubing on the floor of a signwriting and neon specialist company. Culbert, the name behind a gleaming trail of light works in England and Europe, flattens out a mock-up image of his sculpture in situ. On paper, the veins of blue light appear to sear into the grey backdrop of the city he once called home.
“Wellington is wild and windy and physically very strong. There is all this space and water and sun. On the harbour edge, when the sun is shining, the reflections off the water are unbelievable. There’s a lot of light and energy – it’s a very lively place.”
Anybody arriving in Wellington from the airport knows that something’s going on. You pass first a huge rushing clump of resin grasses bending chorus-like out of the wind. Next, a single tower – grey, elegant, utilitarian – spinning colour in relation to the velocity of the infamous gales into fine circular hoops. Then, as you choose between a tunnel or harbour route into the city centre, you see a towering orange spike swinging ponderously between the road and the sea.
These big permanent markers on the landscape – “Pacific Grass” by Kon Dimopoulos, “Tower of Light” by Andrew Drummond, “Zephyrometer” by Phil Price – are the first three works in the developing Meridian Wind Sculpture Walk lining the southern entrance into the city.
“There is not a cluster of wind sculptures in the world that will match this and it will be a defining feature of Wellington,” says Neil Plimmer of the Wellington Sculpture Trust. For the past 23 years, the trust has been curating the capital. The nine-member trust, with its panel of arts professionals, identifies sites, invites submissions, selects work and raises funds from public and private sources. In a “close and symbiotic” relationship with the Wellington City Council, the trust has already been associated with 15 sculptures in the city centre and the Botanic Gardens. Last year the council approved annual funding of $300,000 to implement its Public Art Policy, including $50,000 regular funding for the Trust.
And the barrage of protest heralding each new addition to this catalogue of public art? Actually, the city’s response, says Plimmer, has been overwhelmingly positive.
“People might say, ‘I’m not sure I understand your sculpture’, but that’s as tough as it gets. People claim more for the sculpture than we do – they say it makes the city, that it makes Wellington feel truly international. I don’t know if I would claim that, but they do become part of the fabric of the city.”
The recent vandalism of “Tower of Light” inspired a surge of outrage from Wellingtonians. When it comes to public art, the city seems to be doing something right.
“When you are selecting public art, you can choose either by top down from an artistic or political élite, in which case you end up with art that the public hates, or you choose from bottom up when the whole community discusses what it likes, in which case you risk getting lowest common denominator art,” Plimmer says. “The magic is when you find something acceptable to both. There are all kinds of public art – signs, murals, creative bollards. But we’re interested in high-quality contemporary sculpture.”
Is this the end of the ubiquitous floral clock?
“I think public art is getting a real role in New Zealand,” Plimmer says. “A town that once wanted to pretty itself up with pavers and baskets of flowers will now look for a piece of public sculpture, or several pieces.”
Take Hastings. A trip to Santa Barbara in 1996 by former mayor Jeremy Dwyer was followed by a new determination to blast some civic pride into the town’s history, architecture, landscape – and art. “We had a history of very little public art,” says Hastings District Council’s Colin Hosford. “Nothing to speak of, apart from a couple of old statues – no, not even that. Just a cenotaph.” Following the appointment of an arts advisory panel, the town launched into some serious spending on public art. Among a growing number of works by local artists including Linda Bruce and David Trubridge, a sphere of parasols and leaf forms by leading sculptor Neil Dawson hovers over the city square, not far from the three-metre-high “Nikau Vessel” by Auckland artist Virginia King. “We wanted more than bland concrete paving,” says Hosford.
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