City Art is a conservation framing workshop and gallery offering a range of museum-standard picture framing and art care services to artists, art collectors, museums and galleries.

Andrew Drummond

Nelson-born Christchurch sculptor Andrew Drummond graduated in 1975 with an honours degree in fine art from the University of Waterloo in Ontario,  Canada.

He began his career as a performance artist, using his own body as a canvas for experimentation and creative discourse in line with the 1970s Body Art movement in Europe. This focus on the systems and endurance thresholds of the body soon shifted to an exploration of the connection between humans and the land, the management of our environment and the conservation of natural resources. These themes are evident in a number of large sculptures held in private and public collections throughout the country and overseas.

Artist Statement:

Over the last five years I have been developing a project utilising coal as a metaphor for both the potential transformative power of the material and our relationship to the environment. These works have explored ideas using drawing, grinding and transportation of coal using various kinetic systems. The resulting work extends well beyond any pedantic meaning associated with the mining of coal and allows for readings that relate to our body and to that of the land.

Whilst in the process of constructing these kinetic sculptures and visiting the many coal mines on the West Coast, I have built up a photographic catalogue of the machinery associated with the extraction of coal and the environment surrounding the mines. These photographs are something of a hybrid between the silver-crystal system of the 19th century, and the latest liquid pigment method of reproduction via a drum scanner which builds a digital file and is then used to print the image on paper. Thus a sense of the past in conjunction with 21st century technology is captured, a tension that is furthered through the use of diptychs. I have juxtaposed images of the landscape that relate to the natural process of coal formation over time with that of coal mining machinery. Images such as remote high altitude plateaux, mountainous terrain, waterfalls, swampy land and forests are sometimes set next to studies of fine coal refracting in the sunlight, coal trains, images of vast open cast mines and industrial mechanical devices for extraction and transportation. These juxtapositions seem to rest as opposites and yet construct a complete scene which leads the viewer to create a dialogue for themselves beyond the quotidian. All the prints are black and white, four colour bubble printer on rag paper. August 2004

Gallery:

Peter Adsett
Mark Braunias
Marcus Capes
Peter Carson
Stephen Clarke
Allen Cox
Michael Dell
Andrew Drummond
Guy Frederick
Michael Hamblett
Jeffrey Harris
Roger Hickin
Maree Horner
Kathryn Madill
Michael Reed
Zina Swanson
Philip Trusttum