Simplicity Keynote Of Style For Young Sculptress

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31762, 20 August 1968, Page 2

Simplicity Keynote Of Style For Young Sculptress

Calmness and simplicity are the common denominators of Hilary Osmers’s sculpture. Mrs Osmers is a young woman with an eye and feel for the natural and uncomplicated.

Some of her works done in the last four years which are displayed in the Bank of New Zealand building show her increasing tendency to simple forms in both wood and stone.

A mother of two young children, Mrs Osmers works outside in the peace and quiet of the bush country around her home, on the Haast Pass Road, 30 miles from Wanaka. Her husband, Dave, runs motels and a store for tourists. Their nearest neighbours are more than a mile away, and apart from the busy tourist season from November to May, there is plenty of solitude.

Mrs Osmers gets to work with her chisels whenever she has time off from being mother, school teacher, and playmate to five-year-old Karla and two-year-old George. A former Ham art student and assistant to Russell Clark, she spent a year overseas and studied at the Croyden School of Art in England. Three abstract reliefs in

metallic - finished fibreglass were chosen to hang in the new bank building. This led to her being asked to exhibit there.

Mrs Osmers has a quiet conviction about art. and its place in everyday life. “There’s a lot of pretentious guff talked about art. Living where we are you certainly rebel against it. “I believe in bringing art to people, displaying it out in the open or in thoroughfares. That way everyone sees it. They don’t have to get cultured and go to an art gallery,” she said yesterday Many of the visitors to her outdoor studio are responsive. Americans have bought some of her works and even the local shooters are getting the feel of her abstract forms. “Some people believe that because a piece of sculpture is difficult to carve it must necessarily be good, but sometimes the simpler piece is better because of the meaning it conveys,” she said. Contrast A complex "men in caves” piece shows the intricacy of some of her earlier work, in contrast with the later naturalistic forms which evoke reaction through harmony of simple light and balance.

Colour is adding a different dimension to her wood carving. Its application is not meant to be a significant, artistic comment on modern life, just a way of making the work more light-hearted. “Colour also helps bring out the form. Sculpture relies so much on light and the effect is not easy to achieve in an ordinary home,” said Mrs Osmers. Mrs Osmers has given new emotion to the now traditional “mother and child” study.

One of the most striking pieces in the exhibition is a “mother and child” carved in white limestone. Instead of the usual rather inert posture the child is eagerly returning its mother’s embrace. Obtaining the right materials is the chief barrier to Mrs Osmer’s ultimate aim—to do something big to be erected outdoors. “I have a lot of trouble getting wood hard enough, and I seldom obtain a big piece. I’m always scrounging,” she said.