Review: Paul Dibble X: A Decade in Sculpture 2010 - 2020

This substantial book is an image-heavy, text-light survey of the most recent decade of Paul Dibble’s lengthy and distinguished sculptural practice. It is not the first book by or about him, Bateman having previously published Paul Dibble: The Large Works in 2012. This volume is more in the nature of a progress report on a prolific sculptural career of more than 50 years. Dibble’s wife, Fran, has supplied the brief but informative texts, more in the nature of an accompaniment to the images than as offering any serious or searching critical examination of her husband’s work.

Dibble’s is a versatile practice that ranges in scale from the modest to the monumental and in subject matter from abstraction to realism. Most of his work is cast in bronze in his own foundry which he established in 2000.

The book is organised into six chapters each focussing on a particular group of works. A chapter called The Game of Abstraction isolates that aspect of Dibble’s practice that comes closest to abstraction, works such as a series based on bathers or embracing couples. But these are never fully abstract sculptures in the sense that David Smith or Anthony Caro are abstract artists. Their closest analogy (and influence) is probably Picasso who never entirely abandoned figuration whatever degrees of distortion he perpetrated on his figures. Likewise Dibble, for whom the figure remains fundamental, as in the group of four angular, cubist-derived figures combined with LED lighting constituting Pathways (2016), commissioned for Otago University. Two double page photographs of this work by day and by night are especially effective.

Stilling Water is a chapter devoted to the waterfall sculptures of recent times, which may have their origin in a famous series of paintings by Colin McCahon in 1964, painted around the time that Dibble, as a young student, collaborated with McCahon on various church projects. A falling column of water between two rectangular slabs (somewhat akin to McCahon’s Necessary Protection motif) and pooling at the base recurs in these works often with the addition of fantail (or two) or a human figure perched on the top edge to provide scale. A generous cluster of informative images shows these works at every stage of production from concept drawings through preliminary models to cast pieces at various points in their manufacture in the foundry.

The chapter called Making History focusses on a single work: Featherstone Stand He Tino Mamoa (It’s a Long Way) a memorial piece on the site of Featherstone Military camp, closely related to what is possibly Dibble’s most famous work: Southern Stand: The New Zealand Memorial (2006) at Hyde Park Corner in London. The Featherstone memorial is similarly composed of a row of leaning bronze pillars inscribed with words and images of marching soldiers. The photographic documentation of this majestic work during production and at various times of night and day is comprehensive.

Dibble’s Killer Rabbits, showing humanoid rabbits often carrying rifles, are a humorously sinister commentary on the devastating role of this introduced pest on rural New Zealand. More lyrical and poignant is the chapter Giant Birds which shows Dibble’s love for the indigenous birdlife of Aotearoa New Zealand including godwits, kererū, fantails – all of which are very much alive and (like Binney’s birds) often presented at many times actual size. A more tragic atmosphere hangs over his numerous sculptures of the huia, hunted to extinction more than a century ago but given a poignant afterlife in Dibble’s elegant renditions.

A final chapter Parading Beauty is devoted to Dibble’s gold-gilded kōwhai blossoms which have proved immensely popular though flirting perilously with kitsch, especially at larger sizes.

Reviewed by Peter Simpson