Slaughterman sculptor protests at death and destruction

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 19

Slaughterman sculptor protests at death and destruction

By

GARRY ARTHUR

During the killing season, the Christchurch sculptor Bing Dawe, spends his days carving up carcases on the chain at the Islington freezing works. In the off-season he turns his carving skills to wood and stone, creating from those materials and anything else that fits his purpose disturbing works of art that arise from his concerns about the environment war, and man’s condition.

He works in a huge, airy studio above the Sorbonne Restaurant at the Arts Centre — a room that was part of the fine arts department when the University of Canterbury lived there. The studio, which he shares with a painter, is decorated with preliminary drawings for his sculptures, and piles of rusty tools and machine parts wait in corners to be pressed into service to create the contrasts and paradoxes that distinguish his work. Bing Dawe has been called a protest artist, but he tries to project a broader, more objective image, portraying more than one point of view about such concerns as the rape of the environment and the threat of nuclear war.

Nuclear war is the central theme of the major work for his next show, which opens at the BrookeGifford Gallery on Monday. But as the sculptor says, there is a lot going on in the sculpture, some of it not evident until the viewer has thoroughly explored it and begun to make the connections.

Called “The Cockfight”, it depicts two skeletal fighting birds in a double ring of steel. The ring has burst open, releasing a wider cirle that engulfs a shattered slab of reinforced concrete on which the contorted skeleton of a human figure is starkly etched in a waferthin layer of white wood. “I’m keeping the nuclear thing low-key,” Bing Dawe explains. “You can look at it simply as a cock-fight, or you can extend it to the super-Powers — or to whatever level you like.” The slice of skeleton pressed into concrete can be seen as a representation of the destruction that follows the initial blast. “People feel that if they can hide from the blast they’ll be 0.K.,” he says. “I’m taking it further. The monuments will remain, but the people won’t.”

Accompanying the sculpture will

be 13 woodcuts derived from the same ideas — all enclosed in blast circles or webbed with reinforcing grids, and speaking of boundaries — another strong theme in the sculpture. Some of the woodcuts are on the theme of negative and positive, dealing with opposing views as well as perhaps the X-ray effects of the nuclear blast.

Another dominant symbol in both the sculpture and the woodcuts Js the arrow, seen in the razor-sharp cockerel’s spur, a medieval missile launcher, and numerous lines of direction.

A fine arts graduate from Canterbury University, Bing Dawe, at 32, is widely recognised as one of New Zealand’s leading sculptors. His works are to be found in most major galleries as well as in private collections, and he participated in the prestigious Mildura Sculpture Triennial in 1977.

He was born at Glenavey on the north bank of the Waitaid River, and the river was an early influence on his work. His “Tone Arm — a record to date,” which was shown at Mildura, incorporated a Waitaki River stone which had a smaller stone neatly embedded in a round cavity. He turned it into a kind of record-player arm to continue that wearing process, with the idea of relating the generation of electricity to the river itself. “It’s a tenuous relationship,” he says, “but it is there.”

He is very interested in the use and mis-use of energy. At the time of the 1977 Middle East oil scare he produced a work to answer the question: “What are we goung to do with all those cars when the oil runs out?” It combined a bit of red mudguard with carved leaf-springs, a differential, and river stone.

Stone and wood lashed together in primitive style seem to freeze pieces of sculpture in time, he feels. “And if you allow modernday objects to come in, you can sort of overlap time.” He enjoys tapping into the conjecture and debate that surrounds the energy issue, making his own protests and comments. “I’m an environmental protest sculptor,” he

says, “But I try to take all views if I can.”

Wood was the dominant material for Bing Dawe’s early work because it was cheap and abundant, but he is now working more and more in wrought iron, under the guidance of the artist-blacksmith Noel Gregg. “Now I’m getting to the point where the idea is more important,” he says, “and the materials have to follow the idea.”

Some of his earlier wooden pieces are still in the studio — whimsical sculptures that make wood do apparently contradictory things. Birds are a recurring element of his sculptures. To him they represent freedom, and a work such as his '“Bird Ensnared” (a study for “Cockfight”) referred to freedom restricted.

Another work, “Large soaring bird (dead),” came out of his association with the painter, Ralph Hotere, protesting against the proposed Aramoana smelter. It was basically a bird skeleton 'with aluminium bicycle parts embedded in it — representing the artist’s own ambivalent position: passionate opposition to the smelter, and passionate love for his aluminium racing bike. Another anomaly produced the tension in his recent work called “Bird removing foreign object from its wing.” The foreign object was a silicon chip, and the work commented on the paradoxical difference between two areas of scientific progress — the development of high technology, but inability to explain the depletion of the albatross population in the northern hemisphere. Bing Dawe has also done some functional sculpture, notably an altar, cross, pews, and other furniture for the St Mary’s Catholic Church at New Brighton. He makes domestic furniture, too in his own distinctive way. But his major work is done in a genre that makes marketing difficult — sprawling installations that need plenty of room in public or private collections. Occasionally he is commissioned to produce a piece of sculpture for a particular space but generally he just lets the piece develop as it will.

He now wants to persuade people of the versatility of sculpture, and is working on ideas for incorporating his work in fences, walls, and courtyards.