Inge King

Inge King

Simon Lawrie

A thousand different Inge King, quoted in 4. angles , Frontyard Films, 2010, 27 mins.

Motion , Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1956, a book that was highly influential for King. Moholy-Nagy proposes that ‘vision in motion is simultaneous grasp. Simultaneous grasp is creative performance—seeing, feeling, and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena. It instantaneously integrates and transmutes single elements into a coherent whole. This is valid for vision as well as for the abstract… vision in motion is seeing while moving’, quoted in Trimble, Inge King,

Sculptor , 1996, p. 111.

King, Sculptor, Craftsman House, 1996, p. 19. Inge King, taken from undated notes in her archive, quoted in Trimble, Inge King, Sculptor , 1996, p. 78.

2. Inge King’s sculptural works, whether maquette or modernist monument, establish complex spatial relationships which extend beyond the object to implicate both the viewer and environment in their matrix. King’s positioning of sculptures in relation to the landscape and cityscape was no doubt coloured by her immigration to Australia, an experience both uncertain and underwhelming which she once described as ‘like opening a can of flat beer.’1 Her geometric steel forms were intended to be set in tension against the organic unruliness of the Australian bush. They rely equally on the spatial relationships within the work as on their scale and context to constitute a powerfully engaging presence: ‘I try to measure my work against the vast spaces of this country. It is not the size of the sculpture, but the simplicity and clarity of form expressing inner strength and tension that is the motiving force. I see my monumental sculptures as part of the environment, that they should challenge people to feel the forms and arouse their curiosity to explore them.’2

While King’s early figurative works followed her European expressionist training, by midcentury these had given way to an internationalist abstraction. Sitting between these two approaches, the plaster bas-relief Cathedral of Autun c1951 demonstrates an expressionistic treatment of this gothic French cathedral’s sculptural details. In the decade following her arrival in Australia in 1951, King began to use sheet steel in dynamic geometric abstract compositions that embodied her conception of sculpture as ‘vision in motion’.3 With industrial welding techniques, she joined intersecting planes imbued with expressive texture as molten metal accrued in the crevices. Through a series of maquettes, a form of working and conceptual process which she considered akin to sketching in three dimensions, this technique allowed King to experiment with both the internal spatial configurations of the sculpture, but to also explore potential relations with the environmental context of the work and the viewer’s experience of it. Flight Arrested 1964 and Island Sculpture 1991 demonstrate this approach, both sited in the bushland setting of McClelland’s sculpture park. King’s concern with the public context and reception of sculpture, in particular its integration with architecture, was key to the Group of Four and later Centre 5 sculptors, of which she was a founding member.

Informed by the sleek spareness of Minimalism, by the 1970s King developed more precise engineered shapes with carefully crafted intersecting edges, sometimes using industrially produced elements such as pipes which were sectioned into rings and discs. Through the 1980s she utilised these curved and folded pieces of steel to form a series of arches and environments, often as maquettes for expansive and immersive public sculptures which might be traversed or inhabited by the viewer. The 1990s marked a return to circular and elliptical forms for King, with arrangements of stainless-steel rings evoking the orbital movement of planets and inspired by the first images of space taken by NASA’s Hubble telescope. Rings of Mercury (2) 2006 sets intersecting circles in tense balance, pulling and pulsing with implicit motion and gravitational force. In these works, the cosmological field of infinity provides perhaps the most fitting context for King’s conception of sculpture as ‘drawing from a thousand different angles’4—an immense and unfathomable arena.

Inge King Island Sculpture 1991