ART: Neil Dawson

Canterbury sculptor Neil Dawson with works from Feathers 2020. (Photo: Glyn Davies.)

Fragments of flight

By Sally Blundell

As if caught in gentle freefall, nine larger-than-life feathers graze the walls of the Milford Galleries in Dunedin. Tail feathers, wing feathers, down feathers; feathers of kahu, kotare, blue jay, parrot.

“In all of my work I am trying to create that sense of something that is substantial but also light and deceptively simple,” Canterbury sculptor Neil Dawson says.

That is the thing about a feather. I‘ve always picked them up and you marvel every time you do. They have carried birds that run the globe and now they have served their purpose. They are fragments of flight.

Neil Dawson is an Arts Laureate, a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, a sculptor of international standing. In New Zealand and around the world, in lofty civic spaces, domestic interiors and outdoor spaces, his laser-cut, aluminium and steel sculptures hover like ephemeral figments of our imagination. Using the essential sculptural tools of structure, design and scale, his works – suspended or bolted high above our heads – skew expectations of perspective, volume and mass.

As seen in Chalice in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square, Ferns in Wellington’s Civic Square, Horizons in Gibbs Farm on Kaipara Harbour and Globe, suspended above the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, they are barely-there forms, drawn lines stretching across the landscape or urban air space, filtering light, insinuating depth, flickering between substance and absence.

Dawson’s is not a plinth-based practice. He graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1970 and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 1973. At art school and later when teaching 3D design he gravitated towards the idea of drawing in space. He taught toy-making, admiring their simplicity, their inventiveness, the fact that they don’t have a function “apart from play”.

He began making feathers in the early 1980s when a friend asked him to design a weather vane. The result was a small, copper feather pivoting on the tip of its quill in response to the wind. Since then new technologies and materials – polycarbonate, translucent acrylic, so-called flip-floor or chameleon paints mimicking the iridescence of duck’s wing – have made his feathers lighter, larger, more reflective, more beguiling in their unique detail of rachis, barb and interlocking barbules.

(Photo: Glyn Davies)

A photograph in the Sydney Morning Herald shows a young Dawson striding along the road, a large feather casually slung over one shoulder, for installation on the roof of the Gallery of New South Wales as part of the 1988 Australian Biennale.

In 1990 he created the 10-metre long Featherlight, a single white feather glancing light down through the foyer of the Aotea Centre in Auckland. Birds of a Feather (1997) is a 35-metre long aluminium and stainless steel sculpture hanging palely, ephemerally, in the Tsing Yi MTR Station in Hong Kong.

Two years later he installed Feathers, a spiralling helix of 96 feathers representing Australian bird life in the Olympic Stadium in Sydney. In the International Finance Centre of Shanghai Feather from Afar (2013) is a large, single feather curving lightly, calmly, within the hard-edged context of its financial environment.

(Photo: Glyn Davies)

In more domestic settings feathers up to two metres in length twist and taper, curl and curve, absorbing colour in their mattness, reflecting light in their translucency, changing colour as if catching the sun on a wing.

Dawson is a witness to this endless variation. At his home in Banks Peninsula finches hover around the window, pukekos peer in the open door, hawks and kererū soar past, bellbirds drop their exquisite notes. He has a habit of stopping the car to collect feathers from birds killed on the road. He admires their complexity, their efficiency, their durability, their beauty.

I am not trying to tell a story about the extinction of the huia and all of that kind of stuff but I think art can talk about freedom – freedom to fly but also freedom to live, freedom to have a society where you can do what you want.

When the Hong Kong riots were unfolding he kept thinking of Birds of a Feather, hanging quietly, peaceably, in one of the city’s busiest transit concourses.

“Again, it is that idea of occupying a space with something positive and also beautiful. And a feather is always going to be something people can identify, people of all ages. If you go into any house, you will find a feather somewhere.”

• Feathers 2020, Neil Dawson. Milford Galleries, Dunedin, November 13 – December 8, 2020.