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Making Amends Artist Statements 1. I collect the greywacke pebbles for my work from the Hauraki Gulf. They are found on the sand at low tide and tend to shoal, well-graded in size and shape. Even though they are very plentiful, commonly crushed for road-metal and land fill, and "only base rocks anyway" I still feel uneasy when working them - they are in fact the only whole, undamaged and 'natural' raw material that I use. A few years ago on a trip to collect stones for my exhibition Signs of the Comet (Dowse Art Museum 1983) I climbed down the steep access to the beach, jumping the last few feet to land on a huge shoal of pebbles wet with sea spray. Looking down at the stones around my feet I saw, lying across one stone, a thin, flat copper plate. This material, its colour and shape, the marks and the makers intention gave the object a wonderful incongruity and at the same time a strong connection to my work and the use of copper saws and drills to work to stone. On the trip last winter to select the stones for this exhibition, we walked to the other end of the beach, making cairns of possible stones judged by their size, shape, colour and integrity. Near the end of the beach on the point of turning back I was amazed to find a stone, perfect in all ways, with a carefully applied adhesive bandage, worn and gritty with sand, lying amongst the other stones. I took this as a sign to mean that even with a stone as base as greywacke, the spirit in the stone is still very much intact and a cut, cracked or worked stone is in need of repair and healing to restore its integrity. I see these works as reparation in some small way and I hope that the integrity of the finished pieces will make amends for the damages inflicted. The granite used in this exhibition is predominately African and I have obtained it from monumental masons in Auckland. Again I hope that the finished works will reflect the prior histories of the stones and by making an analogy between the material and the human spiritual condition act as atonement. This is my way of making amends.
2. The ideas for this exhibition originated in 1981. While experimenting with ways to make indelible signs on hard stones, I developed some interesting combinations of stone, glass and metal. Throughout the 1980's I made some technical progress, but other aspects of stone working occupied me and it was not until my new home and workshops were established at Te Rau Moko, Karekare in 1992 that I could really begin to explore the ideas and their expression. The use of granite gave me access to larger, homogenous and fault-free blocks of stone which, together with a new technology of diamond-faced grindstones, and a revision of my whole working method, resulted in the first works that were exhibited in Making Ends Meet (Fingers, 1992). There is an essential and radical destruction required to make these works, as there is in most aspects of human endeavor. This made me think of the ways, that personally and collectively, we take responsibility for our actions. I questioned my attempts to restore integrity. Are they sufficient to make amends for all the deconstruction inherent in these constructions? I offer these stones as my reparation. John Edgar |