• Helen Pollock in her garden.
  • Helen Pollock with her yet-to-be-completed work for this year's NZ Sculpture OnShore.
  • Helen Pollock with her yet-to-be-completed work for this year's NZ Sculpture OnShore.
  • Helen Pollock in her garden with one of her works.
  • Helen Pollock in her garden.

Helen Pollock: NZ Sculpture OnShore a marker of her career

Sculptor Helen Pollock has exhibited at every one of the past 11 NZ Sculpture OnShore exhibitions, and she continues that tradition this year with a work that has especially personal connections.

“New Zealand Sculpture OnShore has been a “nice marker” of her career, she says. “I want to support Women’s Refuge, and the exhibition, and I’ve always thought I’d make something for it.”

All her work, she says, “is a continuation of what went before”. This year’s work is clearly related to the disembodied feet of her powerful ‘Victory Medal’ sculpture installation of 2010 and pairs of feet exhibited as ‘Standing To’ in terracotta, ‘Bronze Medal’ in bronze in 2012, and ‘Marker’ bronze memorial feet in 2016. (In between, she exhibited ‘Another Time and Place’, two heads, in 2014.)

This year, however, the work moves from being a statement about war to a tribute to fellow sculptor Barry Brickell, to whom she is connected by marriage. Feet, still: large, knobbly, work-worn feet, just as the feet of the soldiers were in ‘Victory Medal’. But Barry’s feet this time, encased as they always were, in battered roman sandals. The creation of Barry’s feet demonstrates the organic way Helen’s sculptures evolve.

Feet had their genesis in Helen’s work in 2001, when she made ‘Reading Backwards’ a sculpture with disparate body parts, now outside her front door, that she says was literally about what the title suggests. “That was a really important work, and has informed much of my work,” she says.  “It was about looking at these individual pieces and knowing that they fitted together – but don’t really; it’s about not being able to get the puzzle [of the past] fitted together.”

Some years later, she was drawn again to ‘Reading Backwards’, which had a foot in it. “I thought, I really like that foot, I think I’ll make a pair. And then I made two pairs, and put them in the next [NZSOS] exhibition. It was called ‘Standing To’, and to me it represented the soldiers…. And in the next show I decided I wanted to put quite a few feet in the gun emplacement [at Fort Takapuna]. I thought it would look really good to fill it with feet, [but] how am I going to do that? And it worked out” – as it seems Helen’s works do, as she reads, researches and follows hints that add meaning to each of her works.

She continues the story of the development of ‘Victory Medal’: “I was going to mount the feet on rusted steel. To get the steel into the gun emplacement required four sections; I decided it would be circular as the gun emplacement is circular. So I made lots of feet and put them out on the back lawn beside the studio and tried to figure out how it would work. It turned out to be 36 pairs of feet in four sections, and someone said to me, ‘That’s the size of a small platoon’. And a platoon is divided into four sections.” Serendipity? Or creativity guided by subconscious knowledge?

One of those 36 pairs of feet is cast in bronze.  They represent the recognised hero, says Helen. “But I’m saying that they’re all heroes – and nobody won either.”

‘Victory Medal’ toured New Zealand from the beginning of the First World War centenary commemorations in 2014. It then left New Zealand by sea for Europe, as did our WW1 soldiers. It has since been installed in France and Belgium, in the battlefield towns of Arras and Messines, where New Zealanders played a significant part in the battles. Next month (November) it reaches the grounds of the proposed New Zealand Memorial Museum at Le Quesnoy in France, to commemorate the town’s liberation by the New Zealand Division.

 ‘Victory Medal’, and works before and after it, have been guided to a great extent by Helen’s research into the life of her father, who died when she was young. By the time this work was created, Helen had undertaken considerable research into World War 1 as her father had fought in France on the Western Front, including at Le Quesnoy. As in many families, on his return there was a silence around his war experiences, and she had always wanted to understand what he did.

That research initially led to an exhibition called ‘Surface Tension and Permeability’ in which Helen created arms reaching up; the surface tension referring to what we are unable to absorb or comprehend, and creating permeability so we can absorb. “I was doing these arms, and thinking this is exactly what I’ve been reading about; it’s all about my research into the war… the arms are reaching for some comprehension of the war.”

The first arms Helen ever did were much earlier – in one of the early Sculpture OnShore exhibitions in Genevieve and David Becroft’s garden. Eventually, via ‘Surface Tension…’ they led to what is arguably one of Helen’s major works: ‘between the memory and the silence Falls the Shadow,’ an evocative installation of 18 arms raised in apparent supplication. (Falls the Shadow is a phrase from T. S. Eliot’s desolate poem ‘The Hollow Man’; Helen created  the phrase ‘between the memory and the silence’ as her own commentary on the personal and societal darkness that stems from our inability to articulate the horror of wartime or other experiences of loss.)

As she worked conceptually towards ‘Falls the Shadow’, says Helen, “I thought I could get some clay from the battlefield and mix it with New Zealand clay, and place the sculptures in a pool of water with reflections which go right down into your deeper consciousness, against a backdrop of shell-blasted trees.

“It all came to me in one big rush, an epiphany, in one day. But I thought, you can’t put a work like this in a gallery; it would have to go somewhere special.” She wrote to Rodney Wilson, then director of Auckland War Memorial Museum, pitching the idea of a WW1 memorial installation to Passchendaele and to acknowledge the dreadful loss of New Zealand life there. “He liked the idea, and it went from there.”

“It was like the waves parted and everything fell into place,” Helen continues. She wrote to someone in Passchendaele. They also liked the idea; she visited and got clay, “impregnated with all the battlefield detritus” from the Passchendaele battlefield.

She mixed that clay with the terracotta she usually uses, from Barry Brickell’s Driving Creek Railway and Potteries in Coromandel, and created a forest of arms set against the backdrop of an image of a shell-blasted forest by Frank Hurley.  When the exhibition opened in Auckland a delegation from Passchendaele, with which Helen had by now formed strong online relationships, attended. They asked to take the work back to Passchendaele and it’s now permanently installed in the Passchendaele War Museum as part of their memorial to New Zealanders who fought on the Western Front.

You might think that this work fell into place in a way that only happens once in a lifetime, but the creation of Victory Medal followed a similar developmental process. Helen’s research, reflection and deep thinking, and her openness to following her instincts in creating her works, pay creative dividends more often than not.

The evolution of the creation of an earlier sculpture, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, featured in another NZ Sculpture OnShore exhibition was, she says, also about reaching into the past and “showing what it is”. Helen says this work exemplifies how she works, with her personal story interwoven with research to imbue the work with meaning only discovered retrospectively.  It’s a fascinating tale of how following a “whiff of memory, or an idea” results in a synchronicity that enriches her nuanced artworks.

‘Jacob’s Ladder’ started as a faint memory of a time her father took Helen and her brothers to a beach near Dunedin to climb a ladder up the cliffside. Intermittently, as an adult, she thought that perhaps she could find the ladder again. A passing mention to a friend resulted in “a photo of it lying in a paddock behind his girlfriend’s bach”. She went to see it, and asked the farmer if she could take it back to Auckland. After some months, he said she could have it, but she had to write a story for the local paper about why she’d like it.

“As I wrote this story, I thought I’d like to get it right. Dad was showing us this ladder because he wanted to show his past as a mountaineer to us, so I tied his mountaineering history into the story. I looked him up in a guide book, and figured out that on one of his climbs – the seventh ascent of Mt Aspiring, in 1927 – the team took a full-size movie camera with them! I thought, maybe I could get that film.”

As indeed she could: the Film Archive had the film,­ and Helen was rewarded with “a moving image of my father on Mt Aspiring with other members of the team…. I thought, that’s amazing; in a way I’ve contacted my father….”

“We took the rusted steel ladder in exchange for this story,” she continues, “and took it to our bach at Bethell’s Beach. But I thought I had better find out what the biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder is –to put into the written account. And I read about how Jacob went into the desert and put his head on a stone and dreamt of the angels ascending and descending, and when he awoke he called the place Bethell!”

“It’s amazing: here I am going into this story, and this led to that led to this. And that is no different, in a way, from the others. I was looking for a way of accessing information I didn’t have, that you can’t get unless you do something like this. It’s because I followed, not a dream exactly, but an inspiration; a thought; tiny, tiny hints. The work itself is guiding it; the ideas are guiding it. Something flicks up that’s interesting and shows me where to go next.

“If I look at my list of exhibitions,” Helen concludes, “I could have designed then like that – but I didn’t. I don’t know what the next one is going to be, ever, but when I look back thy they all make sense as a sequence.”

Barry’s feet, still a work in progress as we talk, are the next step in that sequence. Like Helen’s other sculptures, they can be universally appreciated (in this case as a tribute to one of New Zealand’s great potters/sculptors), but they also have a deeply personal overlay that imbues added meaning to the work.

NZ Sculpture OnShore, Fort Takapuna, 10am-5pm, 3-18 November (closed Mondays)

www.nzsculptureonshore.co.nz #NZSOS @NZSCULPT

[Sidebar:]

NZ Sculpture OnShore 2018

  • A large-scale outdoor exhibition of 90 contemporary New Zealand art works by established and emerging artists
  • Extended to 14 days in 2018, with opportunity over three weekends to see the artworks
  • An indoor Gallery cash and carry shop with smaller pieces to suit every budget.
  • Children’s Sculpture Exhibition, taking place in the underground Historic Fort, with works created by students from 16 Auckland schools.
  • A weekday schools programme, with teacher resource materials, and educators on site.
  • Fisher Funds People’s Choice Award with cash prize money for the winning artist and a prize draw from among voters
  • In 2018 increased emphasis on accessibility and inclusion. Chauffeured golf carts will enable disabled people to better see the outdoor exhibition; funds provided for 200 pupils and teachers from Auckland decile 1 schools to travel to the event.