Press, Reviews & Write-ups
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.
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Fascination with plastic endures
You can’t keep a good sculpture down
A spinning, hypnotic sculpture has come out of hiding and been returned to where it belongs.
Five years ago, the sculpture was removed from the foyer of Dunedin Hospital.
But former Dunedin artist Derek Ball has spent the past two weeks restoring his 3m-high piece, which was created to disguise a concrete pillar 25 years ago when the ward block opened.
Mr Ball was pleased to have the opportunity to modify the sculpture, made from PVC drainpipe, heated and twisted acrylic, wood, glass and metal.
