Press » The Plastic Universal: Derek Ball’s Sculptures
They stand displayed in the Eastern Southland Gallery on slightly sloping shelves, looking like transparent blocks of polished and elemental crystal. Sealed inside each is a miniature landscape, seemingly suspended in solemn stillness beneath a softly luminous sky. At first glance, these smartly sawn-off mineral lumps remind you of memorial tablets and headstones in a cemetery. Or else of grave-top glass bell jars and glass domes: the kind that hold flowers and other mementoes. They suggest, then, emblems of memory. It’s as if volatile, subterranean emotions have been subsumed in these glassy caskets, with their embedded, memorial landscapes.
Close up, you gaze through and beyond the smooth surface of each, as if staring like a traveller through the windowpane of a car or bus or truck or plane, and thus you get the feeling that you’re witnessing an atmosphere distilled; you have the sensation of seeing vistas strange and magical, each twinkling under the Gallery lights like a vision, like a dreamscape, like the world held in a spell.
This set of twelve tabletop sculptures by Derek Ball, all made between 2004 and 2008, and exhibited as a group under the title Another Dimension at Gore’s Eastern Southland Gallery during April and May 2008, depicts some of the great hill ranges of the South Island, from Nelson’s Mt Arthur seen against the setting sun, to Marlborough’s enshadowed Wairau Hills, to the snow-bound Torlesse Range of mid-Canterbury, to the forested steep-sided slopes of the West Coast, to the dry and rugged uplands of Central Otago. And over these geological formations, these slices of land uplifted high, float distinctive cloud formations whose shapes express some bond, some relationship, with the morphology below. There are shreds of grey cirrostratus over the Torlesse Range, greyish-white clusters of cumulostratus drifting like hot air balloons over the Wither Hills, and heaped-up and heavy-looking white cumulus hanging low over Central Otago’s hills — all shaped by invisible air currents that the sculptor’s technique mimics.
Most of the sculptures are smaller than a sheet of A4 but thicker than a big Bible, and each tapers upward to be slightly narrower at the top than the base. These sculptures may be miniatures, but they convey a powerful sense of a compressed mass. They seem, in fact, weighty, monumental, and so artfully tinted as to give the impression that the sky is all solidified air and that the crumpled and wrinkled folds of the earth are actual gullies and ridges.
Yet of course this is an optical illusion. Each work is made from cast resin, moulded into pigmented layers, fused one to the other, then sanded back to a smooth and sparkling finish. Each work glows as filmy as transparent silk or as clear water. The sculpture entitled “Winter Torlesse” (2008) offers a landscape that seems encased in ice: the sky is cold and wind-scoured, and tinged a delicate turquoise. And beyond this, it’s a sovereign landscape, inward and brooding, a place of solitude. If each cast resin block is a container, each is also a kind of pedestal, elevating the landscape within to something spiritual, transcendent: the unearthly earth.
Depicting the aerial, the empyrean, the sky above, Ball offers refraction and auroras — a sense of depth. In “Winters Evening” (2005), there’s a shading in the sky of such exquisite indeterminacy you cannot quite tell where the orange leaves off and the yellow begins. The effect is more than theatrical; it’s as though the eye of the sculptor has probed the ambiguities of pictorial space and got the measure of the gradations of pale fire in the sky as the planet orbits the sun. It’s a phenomenon the artist is able to represent because his material is itself about gradations, about the blending of a sense of intimacy and immediacy with a sense of great distance.
In “Sunset” (2008), evening is spread out against the sky in the form of smooth, fleecy-white clouds stained a fiery reddish-pink by the glare of the sun as it sets behind a snow-covered mountain range. The sun’s spectacular brightness is created by a fluorescent light concealed behind the sculpture’s steel-sheathed frame. “Moonlight” (2008), which depicts the full moon behind the same mountain range, also features electroluminescence. The night sky and the shroud-like nimbus of cloud covering the moon is lit up to eerie effect by a light-emitting diode, again concealed by the steel frame.
Changing lights and colours, sunsets and sunrises, magic lantern effects, the sense of gazing into a light-well — these works are almost oceanic celebrations of lyricism. The clear South Pacific sky is not only made portable, it’s as if, in each one, time itself has been stopped and held up for inspection.
What these works offer is a contemporary take on the Sublime tradition in landscape, recalling Colin McCahon’s landscape paintings, which offered heavenly messages, be they of North Otago and Canterbury hillscapes or of the sunset seen from Auckland’s West Coast.
And the works also invoke the floating hazed colour found in abstract expressionism, as exemplified by the American painter Mark Rothko. This sublimity, in turn, can be linked back to the Romantic landscape tradition cultivated by 19th century European painters such as Casper David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Rung, as well as by British painters like John Constable and J.W.T. Turner, or more pertinently colonial New Zealand painting practitioners such as William Hodge and John Gully.
But though Ball reveals himself here as a remarkable colourist, whose latter-day transcendent tones also have affinities with the pastel hues of Marilynn Webb’s studies and the gleaming oils of Grahame Sydney’s paintings, he emphatically occupies this territory as a sculptor.
Just as the Bulgarian-American sculptor Christo wittily wrapped the landscape in plastic, so has Derek Ball, but in his own distinctive way. And just as the American sculptor Jim Turrell has constructed sculptures out in the desert made of nothing except the light in the sky and the framing device of an aperture in a wall, so, too, Derek Ball offers us the sky’s framed immateriality, albeit in a metaphorical fashion.
Locally, as an illusion-maker, Derek Ball has similar sculptural concerns to those of Neil Dawson: both have been concerned with testing the boundaries of landscape conventions employing the tradition of mechanically-engineered abstraction that stretches back to the early twentieth century European Constructivist artists such as Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner. Other New Zealand sculptors with whom Ball has stylistic interests in common are Marte Szirmay, the late Carl Sydow and Don Driver: all began using plastic as a sculptural material during the Sixties. (There were a number of other sculptors in the Sixties and Seventies, including Chris Booth and Bing Dawe, using plastic expressively, though many no longer do so.)
Derek Ball, who has been devoted to using industrial materials since early in his career, has also had a long-term interest in kinetic or moving sculpture, notably in what is perhaps his best known work, the Dunedin Public Library Plaza sculpture, commissioned in 1981 and erected in June 1982. Arguably — not least because of its simpliciy and functionality — New Zealand’s finest and most successful kinetic public sculpture, Ball’s Library Plaza work consists of three rotating aluminium fan-like forms — based on the column, the sphere and the triangle, respectively — mounted on top of a 7.4 metre stainless steel column, making the work essentially vandal-proof.
It resembles a dynamic radio mast, a windmilling machine, whose scoops and vanes are flung into motion by gusts of air. It might be an ornamental flagpole, or an imitation turbine, transmuting the arbitrary activity of breezes into giddy visibility, with each of the three sections spinning at different speeds and sometimes in different directions. It’s at once dreamily playful, poignantly poetic, and sinisterly grandiose — as if gathering into its plastic cups the city’s whispered secrets.
Another well-known Derek Ball kinetic sculpture, at least in Dunedin, is his commission for the Dunedin Public Hospital’s main public foyer, designed and constructed in 1981-1982, removed in the course of building refurbishment in 2001, and reinstalled by the artist with minor alterations in 2005. It’s a 3-metre high structure, consisting of four glassed-in mirrored cabinets, built so as to conceal a central concrete pillar in the foyer. Each cabinet contains a plastic geometric structure rotating steadily on spindles. These gyrating ribbons and pipes in rigid plastic serve to celebrate science: the amalgamation of healing and technology. Like most of Derek Ball’s work this sculpture is utopian in intention: a public monument employing that once-and-future wonder material plastic in symbolic shapes, such as that of the DNA helix.
Derek Ball graduated from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1966, held the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1968, and worked variously as an illustrator and art teacher before travelling overseas. In the early 1970s he lived in San Francisco where he taught, and worked as a sculptor, before he and his family returned to New Zealand in 1976.
In 1988 the Dunedin Public Art Gallery staged a retrospective entitled Derek Ball — A Decade of Sculpture. The selection of works displayed revealed the consistency of his themes, his materials, and his working methods — a consistency which he has maintained throughout his working career as a sculptor. If other modernist artists have veered away from using plastics, or have turned to using it as a recycled waste product, a dystopian material assembled into statements about the environment, consumerism or world politics, Ball has preferred to stick with its utopian promise. Plastic, after all, lightweight and durable and shape-shifting, remains central to architecture and to building, to industry and to science, to vehicle manufacture and to space exploration.
Ball has used plastic as a material in two distinct ways: the first as thin sheets able to be shaped by being heated; the second as a liquid substance that can be shaped by being poured into moulds and hardened with the addition of a catalyst. In a way, he’s a kind of plastic surgeon able to work his chose material into objects of beauty; testing it against the linear ripples and twists of Op Art, the simple unornamented unit modules of Minimalist Art, the bubbly kitsch jokiness of Pop Art, and even the anxious eclectic ornamentation of Art Nouveau with its squirming candelabras and twisting tendrils.
But if you had to use one word to sum up Derek Ball’s restless experimentalism, as manifested in the pieces in his 1988 retrospective it would be “biomorphic”. In works such as the big, all-white plastic sculpture “Fountain from Garden of Earthly Delights” (1979) — based on a structure depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s medieval triptych painting “Garden of Earthly Delights” — or “Fluid Circle” (1978-1980) — produced in an edition of 50 — or “Forbidden Fruit” (1980), everywhere there is homage to the fecundity of nature: to its bud-like, or pod-like, or gourd-like, organic exuberance. “Fluid Circle”, in which coloured fluids move as if pulsating, brings to mind the workings of body glands; while “Forbidden Fruit” is a work which seems about to hatch, or give birth. This shapeliness of the natural world is also a theme in the Another Dimension sequence, with its biomorphic clouds.
The Constructivist tradition from which Derek Ball derives inspiration was dedicated to celebrating the twentieth century principles of space, time and motion as revealed by Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: this, after all, served to overturn tradition notions of perspective and perception. (One of Derek Ball’s Seventies works was entitled “Vacuum Forming Einstein”.)
Yet there’s nothing heavy-handed or theory-bound about Ball’s sculptures; rather they encapsulate lightness of being, and they strive for elegance and simplicity. Buoyancy is represented by those Library Plaza kinetic sculpture vanes which scoop up the wind, or which the wind scoops up and tries to do whirl away with. Or by those winding plastic ribbons in the Dunedin Public Hospital foyer, always ascending, always trying to get up, up and away.
If Ball’s kinetics are a celebration of good vibrations and of many-sided movement, the Another Dimension wedges, with their subtle translucent striations, layer upon layer, their faraway hills, their sky-climbing clouds, might represent views from a glider or helicopter borne on updraughts towards airy thinness, towards an ethereal phenomenology. For, staring at the clear weather, the white light, the juice of sunshine crushed into plastic, that these votive objects offer, you begin to see how they might be edging towards serenity, towards the tipping point of the gaze where elegant constructions shimmer into optical phenomena, dematerialise into light. Out of a meditation on landscape, and on the physical sciences of geology, optics and meteorology, Derek Ball has conjured paradox: the sculpture as both solid and void, a kind of mirage, only preserved and set hard, just beyond touching.