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Start with the feeling of walking into the gallery and being hit by something huge, an interior landscape, a petrochemical wonderland. The huge twining mass of intricately draped and interlinked polystyrene is soft, almost glowing under the gallery lights. The installation Snow Ball Blind Time lacks the distancing irony and sardonic humour often present in New Zealand artist Peter Robinson’s work: it is open to interpretation, inviting, suggesting a world in ways that previous work, like the hanging models of expanding, interpenetrating universes the artist showed at the 2001 Venice Biennale, alluded to, but this is both a model of a universe and a universe.
In his twenty-something years of practice, Robinson’s sculpture and painting have moved from critiques of identity politics and art’s export imperative, to a recent more formal focus. Snow Ball Blind Time at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth marks the first time a single artist has been given the use of the entire space since Real Time, an interactive environment, created by young artist Leon Narbey, that filled the gallery with light and sound for its opening thirty-eight years earlier. Curated by the Gallery’s director, Rhana Devenport, the work evolved in response to the architecture of the Govett-Brewster, a former picture theatre with rambling interconnected galleries. Through these spaces twists a huge tangle of machine-cut polystyrene chains, seven continuous strands, some as massive as the anchor chain for a supertanker, some as delicate as those embellishing a designer handbag. The sinuous tangle of chains controls movement through the gallery, blocking access, dangling from mezzanines and gantries, twisting back upon itself.
The Blind Time of the title refers to Robert Morris’s drawings which were... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline