Art
Touch wood
by David Eggleton
Sculptor Peter Nicholls transforms remnants of the discarded into new symbols.
At first glance, Journeywork by Dunedin-based sculptor Peter Nicholls looks like salvage from an axemen’s carnival: there’s wood everywhere – splayed and flayed, trimmed and notched, curved and jointed. But it’s all neatly arranged, and you soon begin to see there’s actually a well-ordered spareness and simplicity to the display. Log butts lie trussed; planks are wired together; small, curved and perforated shields of metal, shaped like forest foliage, hang on walls; and shiny wedges of aluminium are locked in embrace with tiny branches of swamp kauri to form tabletop entanglements.
Yet if what springs to mind are memories of the colonial age of wood – the bushwhacker, the sawmill worker, the pioneer putting up a post and rail fence – when you look closer you see that Nicholls is not just memorialising the erection of some backblocks bush town, or the clearing of ghostly paddocks full of the stumps and burned carcasses of trees. His journeying is more elemental than that: it’s about cycles of renewal and recovery. Working with wind-fallen trees, with driftwood, with discarded industrial timbers and metals, Nicholls is a re-cycler, an environmental artist, who meditates on our dialectical relationship with nature by telling a personal story.
Curated by Jodie Dalgleish, who in the free fold-out catalogue provides an informative essay highlighting themes of continuity in Nicholls’ sprawling oeuvre, Journeywork is a retrospective exhibition that covers nearly 40 years of production by the artist. It features nine major sculptures, several maquettes of site-specific sculptures, sequences of drawings and photographs, videos of environmental performances and a taped interview with the artist explaining the genesis of two works: River Crossings (1990) and Whanganui (1990).
When the missionary and Treaty of Waitangi negotiator Richard Taylor travelled up from the Wanganui settlement through to the Taranaki Bight in the 1840s, he gave Maori villages Christian place-names and planted European botanical specimens and seeds, including gorse: he was a figure of messianic zeal. He was also Nicholls’ maternal great-great-grandfather. Nicholls’ earliest memories, the exhibition tells us, include the Whanganui River being in flood when he was four years old – “it flooded the [mud] flats around the town … beaches were littered with trees washed out from the upper river.”
If the heart of Nicholls’ enterprise is an ability to shape wood into metaphor, using for syntax the vernacular carpentry of the pioneers, those metaphors are about what binds him, and by extension us, to the land. So the sequence of dovetailed timbers that is Whanganui, laid out across the floor, represents a journey through the landscape, only the artist makes the woodwork seem to billow, like something liquid and flowing. In his wooden river, he’s embedded a waka paddle, the outline of a saw and the head of a machete, along with a Maori adze blade and a Pakeha axe handle. An inlaid brass cross doubles as four points of the compass.
Thus Nicholls fuses remnants of the worn out and discarded into new symbols. Writhing, grooved, gnarled, smoothed, his pieces of broken trees, with their suggestion of the outlines of tortuous ridges and ravines, or of tumbling river beds, reach towards the earth’s primeval energies.
But beyond the geomorphological, there’s the archeological: the human trace. Perhaps the most memorable work is Musa (2002). On a crisscross cradle of big wooden blocks rests two great, steel, ore-crusher mantles, refashioned into a kind of giant chalice. This massive funereal sculpture, silver and black and edged with gold-leaf, is at once stark, sombre and beautiful, as memorable and memorious as the Otago landscape in winter.
JOURNEYWORK: THE SCULPTURE OF PETER NICHOLLS, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, until June 15.
