Neil Dawson

Biography

In the fourth form at school in Hastings, Neil Dawson climbed onto the assembly hall roof and painted “April Fool” on it in large white letters. The prank made the front page of the Hawke’s Bay Herald-Tribune. He himself calls it the beginning of his career in public art.

Francis Neil Dawson was born on 6 November 1948 in Christchurch. His father, John Brent Dawson, was a minister, and his mother was Florence Emily, née Carlisle. He grew up in Masterton, Petone and Hastings, and received his secondary education at Hastings Boys’ High School. From 1966 to 1969 Dawson studied at the University of Canterbury under Tom Taylor and Eric Doudney, gained a Diploma of Fine Arts with honours, and then spent a year at teachers’ college. In 1973, with the help of a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant, he completed a course in sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Back in New Zealand, he drove a truck for four years. From 1975 he taught drawing and design at Christchurch Polytechnic and left in 1984 to work as a full-time sculptor. His studio was the former Oddfellows’ Hall in the suburb of Linwood.

He began exhibiting straight after art school. His first solo show in a dealer gallery, “House Alterations”, took place in 1978 at the Brooke Gifford Gallery in Christchurch. The following year the Robert McDougall Art Gallery gave him his first major museum exhibition, “Seascape”. In 1989 the National Art Gallery in Wellington, now Te Papa Tongarewa, presented a survey of his work, “Neil Dawson Site Works 1981–1989”. Dawson’s smaller pieces often rely on illusion and on optical patterns such as moiré; many of them hang on walls, while others use playing cards and willow-pattern crockery.

His first outdoor sculpture, “Echo” (1981), was suspended above the quadrangle of the Christchurch Arts Centre. It is made of fibreglass tubing and looks like an abstract composition from almost any angle, but from one spot it forms the outline of a simple house. Dawson described it as a three-dimensional, life-sized drawing. The work was taken down after the Christchurch earthquake of 2010 and reinstalled in 2021. In 1984 the Bank of New Zealand commissioned a sculpture for its head office in Wellington: “The Rock”, five metres by four, hung four metres above the ground. Its outline, generated by computer, was taken from a rock he had found in McCormack’s Bay, not far from his studio. In 1989 he was invited to the exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where the curator Jean-Hubert Martin wanted to correct the Eurocentric slant of such programmes. Dawson showed “Globe”, an 85-kilogram metal sphere depicting the earth from space, suspended twenty-five metres above the courtyard; the logistics were far from simple. In 1992 “Throwback” was installed in Albert Park behind the Auckland Art Gallery, a commission marking the gallery’s centenary. In 1994 “Horizons” appeared, commissioned by Alan Gibbs as one of the first large works at Gibbs Farm, a sculpture park.

In 1998 the Wellington Sculpture Trust commissioned “Ferns”: eleven cut-out fern shapes formed into a sphere 3.4 metres in diameter and suspended above Civic Square. The work was taken down in 2015, and three years later a new version in stainless steel was installed. “Ferns” is often used as a visual symbol of the city.

For the 150th anniversary of the founding of Canterbury, “The Chalice” appeared in 2001, an inverted cone eighteen metres high near Christchurch Cathedral, echoing its spire; shapes of native plants were cut into its surface. The cathedral was badly damaged in the earthquake of 2011, but “The Chalice” remained standing. Dawson hoped its survival would be seen as a symbol of recovery rather than of the earthquake itself.

“Fanfare” was suspended from the Sydney Harbour Bridge on New Year’s Eve 2005: 350 reflective pinwheels form a sphere. In 2007 the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, presented the sculpture to Christchurch City Council. It spent a long time in storage and was finally installed beside State Highway 1, south of the Waimakariri River bridge, to greet people entering the city from the north. Mayor Lianne Dalziel and Dawson himself unveiled it on 10 June 2015. He called his work “basically just a ball with some propellers on it”.

“Spires” in Latimer Square, Christchurch, was installed in 2014. Dawson began by trying to draw from memory the demolished spire of the cathedral. As first planned, the sculpture was to hover over the centre of the square on the axis of Worcester Street, to link it with the cathedral, but it now stands in the southern half of the square, not far from the Cardboard Cathedral. The idea arose in 2012, when a structural engineer approached him; she gave her time free to work out the structural design. In 2017 his sculpture “Ascension” was suspended in the middle of Masterton’s northern roundabout.

In 1990 Dawson received the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal, and in 2003 the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Arts Laureate Award. In the 2004 New Year Honours he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to sculpture.