Downstairs
23 March – 4 April
'NEW WORK: SCULPTURE & DRAWINGS' - David Kelvin Guerin
DAVID KELVIN GUERIN
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work is always concerned with memory - sculpture's most complex element - and the materiality of manifesting memory. Materials at sculpture's heart; the thingness of three-dimensional visual communication. I love it best when I find a thing - a distressed plank of wood, say, or an off-cut of metal, an item of ruined or discarded furniture, a gnarly lump of driftwood, an obsolete tool or mechanical part, a trashed drawing or magazine advertisement - that already possesses evidence of pre-existing marks of someone who has gone before me.
Then I transform that thing. I recontextualise it, give it a new relevance through combining or reintegrating it into a new whole to reveal its mauri. I always attempt to find some kind of affective acknowledgement from my myriad appropriations in my creative search for new imagery. In turn, these help define what it is to be here, now; to be Pākeha, a partner, a father and grandfather, an engaged member of community; of the human community. I use symbol, repetition, the hand-held/hand-made, the imagined historical narrative space, the quotidian - everyday object (wood, stone, steel, bronze, the found object) to further the above-stated aims.
In the landscapes of my mind, I am truly grateful for this opportunity.
Foreground: 'Nga Tāngata Diptych' - David Guerin
