A pack of playing cards and a pair of scissors - that was the starting point for Neil Dawson’s latest work, Whare, at Brick Bay. The work had its inception while the artist was sitting in front of television, sketching and cutting up paper shapes. However its concept has a more serious genesis, the current economic recession.
In Whare Dawson references the current economic recession in terms of a house of falling cards. Even more specifically the work can be read as a comment on this country’s determined dependence on its love affair with investment in the residential housing market. Nestled in the bush, this unique form of a whare suggests safety and shelter; it is the recognizable design of a playing card that questions this security and inserts a link to taking a gamble. Such whimsical humour and the cultural mix unique to Aotearoa/New Zealand characterize Dawson’s work. The combination of the European playing card pattern and Maori design gives the work a distinctly New Zealand flavour.
Dawson often transforms an item from an everyday context into an artwork – a chalice, a window lunette, a globe, the letter D, a rock, a feather, a lean-to verandah – all have been thus treated. Similarly his work is often injected with humour – and his playing card works are no exception. It is often an element of the unexpected that adds the magic to Neil Dawson’s work and which makes him one of the country’s most sought after sculptors. His stairway to heaven, Vanishing Stair, designed for the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, stayed in the public’s mind long after the Games were over. His integration of the Christian liturgical vessel and native leaf patterns of Aotearoa/New Zealand in Chalice, and the twists and turns of Other People’s Houses that he built for Connells Bay and are all part of his unique vocabulary. So too is his Whare.
A sculptor of international repute, Dawson has created large scale public artwork for cities around the world, and he is represented in major public and private collections in Europe, Great Britain, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He was awarded an Arts Laureate by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2003 and the following year was created a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to sculpture.
Dr Robin Woodward