PRECIPICE – GRAHAM BENNETT – 24 June-12 July 2025

The postponement of a residency in Japan from 2019 to 2024 due to the pandemic gave Bennett an opportunity to extend and further clarify his thoughts and also to explore ideas as to how working in a rural Japanese environment might influence his project’s process and outcome. He acknowledges Japanese tradition in construction methods combining strength and delicacy, folded paper, sustainable materials – bamboo, Awagami bamboo paper, kakishibu dye – and the proportions of tatami. Kakishibu – a 13th Century dye made from fermenting green persimmons was used to dye fabric, and to waterproof and stain paper and wood.

Works completed during and since the Residency explore ideas concerning a blindness to our global fragility particularly to the pending environmental catastrophe but also across social issues, technological, political, and historical questions.
Can we hold together and avoid the abyss? How should we live in a fractured world? What connects and divides us?

The installation Fracture explores portions of globes hanging in the balance with a community of pinned and precarious worlds standing apart – or are they standing together? Combining form, space and materiality with intricacy and detail, this work embodies layers of meaning to decode and suggests solutions are not simple.

The focus is on the Polar regions as climate indicators and our part of the world – the Pacific Ocean, Te Moananui-a-Kiwa – which is sandwiched between the land masses of North America and China that together contribute 44% of the global CO2 emissions. This human-scaled grouping of worlds fractured and pinned stand as a silent cry. How should we live? Where lies hope?

For a catalogue of Graham Bennett’s full body of work exhibited in PRECIPICE please contact us

 

     

Internationally recognised NZ sculptor Graham Bennett has explored the ways in which humankind uses and quantifies the natural environment and the impact this has on the living world. Bennett uses the physical and abstract languages of navigation and measurement – longitude or latitude, surveying marks, scales, triangulation all find their place in his sculptures. Bennett extends these scientific and visual metaphors with commentary about our rushing headlong towards an environmental and social precipice.

Born in Nelson, New Zealand in 1947, Bennett completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1970. Since, Bennett has exhibited consistently with over 60 solo shows both within New Zealand and internationally, including two major public retrospective exhibitions in Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū and in The Canterbury Museum, as well as representing a Japanese Gallery in two International Art Fairs in Tokyo. Bennett has been the recipient of several awards and residencies and his artwork is held in many public and private collections globally. An extensive biography, bibliography and catalogue of works is available in the major publication Graham Bennett Around Every Circle – Ron Sang Publications, and viewable online at bennettsculpture.co.nz