In Site Library - Greater Dunedin: Beech Leaf Stepping Stones (Mosgiel) (1996)

Beech Leaf Stepping Stones (Mosgiel)

Corner of Gordon and Factory Roads, Mosgiel (OST Pubications sculpture trail #45)

Siegfried Kogelmeir

InSite

 

Beech Leaves ....... Mosgiel ..... Siegfried Koeglmeier, artist.

 

In a small park at the junction of Gordon Road and Factory Road in Mosgiel, not far from the main shopping centre, there is an art installation that may go unnoticed by shoppers who cross the grass on their way to the new public convenience located there. The installation is the work of Siegfried Koeglmeier, an artist whose work is concerned with relations between nature and culture.

 

"Beech Leaves" comprises of paving stones of varying sizes, in the shape of beech leaves, arranged with no discernible pattern but radiating from the furthest corner of the reserve where a European Beech tree spreads its branches. In its unassertive way the work describes the span of the tree and mimics the apparently random fall of leaves. Furthermore, it draws attention to the way the leaf-fall describes the radius of the canopy above. In the midst of random activity it discovers a sort of order.

 

This mixture of randomness and structure is typical of Koeglmeier's work which looks for a pattern in the natural world. He is a conceptual artist and is often as interested in exploring how a work of art comes to be made as in the finished product. Consequently each stage of a work of art is photographed and sometimes this documentation is all that remained to be seen. On one occasion he painted an abstract painting which he then cut into small symmetrical pieces and exhibited these pieces in a gallery.

 

Koeglmeier was born in East Berlin and came to New Zealand in 1983. It may be that the European origins of the tree in the park caught the artist's attention both as a symbol of the complexities of New Zealand's colonial history and as a token of his own migration from Europe. For seventeen years he was active in the artistic life of Dunedin and exhibited often around the city. In 1990, he was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship.

 

On occasion, Koeglmeier commented on the difficulty of sustaining a career as an artist in New Zealand. He returned to Germany in 2000 nine years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

 

Richard Dingwall

 

Text Copyright Richard Dingwall