Otago Sculpture Trust

In Site Library - Greater Dunedin: Cones (Public Art Gallery) (2001)

The Cones by Neil Dawson Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

These five perplexing cones made an appearance high in the atrium of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in June 2001. They are the product of the Christchurch based sculptor Neil Dawson.

Because Cones is an art gallery commission the artist has made a sculpture about art. The cones can be seen to contain a summary of Dawson's career so far. For example, the first of the cones looks like it is made of ferns. This can be linked to the fern sphere that soars so beautifully above Civic Square in Wellington. In the second of the cones there seems to be a homage to one of the art heroes of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp who used seven cones in his great mysterious work "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even". Antecedents of Neil Dawson's earlier work can be found in the other cones. The Perspex structure may allude to the "stairway to heaven" he installed outside the Centre for Contemporary Art in Sydney, the wire mesh to some of his smaller gallery works.

Dawson is an artist with an international reputation. He has launched a globe outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris and floated giant feathers in Hong Kong. His most celebrated piece has been in Cathedral Square in Christchurch. It seems improbable that any incursion of modern sculpture into that formal Victorian vista would be tolerated but the eighteen metre high Chalice has secured a place in the hearts of Christchurch folk since it was erected.

The explanation for this success is in the characteristic aura of generous humanity that attaches to Dawson's work. He is an artist magician whose works seem to defy gravity. They have a lightness of conception that is matched by a profundity of vision. You always feel better for having looked at a Neil Dawson sculpture.

Richard Dingwall

Text Copyright Richard Dingwall