City Art is a conservation framing workshop and gallery offering a range of museum-standard art care services to artists, art collectors, museums and galleries.
Andrew Drummond
Andrew Drummond's works have long ploughed the geological history
of New Zealand's South Island and the impact of humanity on the
contours of the land. He has channelled the properties of sphagnum
moss, wax, copper, brass, slate, stripped willow, glass and coal
to create sophisticated works binding the artist’s imagination
with the physical make-up of the earth.
In his smaller works, the physical world is manipulated into the guileless form of the museum-type artefact. The clean, sophisticated lines of his larger kinetic works sway and stride in long silent hypnotic movements as if traversing the vast sweep of the Canterbury Plains in a relentless navigation of this country’s exploitation of the land. In recent years Drummond has focussed on coal, those blackened threads of compacted history embedded in the West Coast of the South Island. He focuses on the dark veins of the 2-400 million year old coal seam, part of an almost human-like bloodline of the planet’s history. Evoking the entire story of coal, from the gashed landscapes of the mines to the fires of industry, these works record the excavation, transportation and burning of a raw material vital to the industrialisation of an increasingly urban world.
Drummond's work suggests the transforming powers of the alchemist – a coolly elegant dream time in which matter is transformed from lumpen rock to flawless surfaces of copper, brass and coal.
In the photographic prints shown here, Drummond depicts a physical space that is shaped by both the artist's and the industrialist's excavation of the land. The sense of agelessness and the long low hum of the earth’s rhythms are both bigger than the small endeavours driven by human ideologies and yet deeply altered by those very endeavours. The fine details of the works pick out the glitter of coal, the slow contours of the land, the soft weight of the waterfall, the rush and speed of the coal train. Drummond’s single kinetic work in this exhibition is a seemingly simple apparatus of glass and coal. Look closely however and see the slow undulation of the coal, the gentle rise and fall of the landscape captured in the long line of the glass capsule.
Gallery:
Peter Adsett
Mark Braunias
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
