ARTICLES
Articles
This Not So Silent Spring
John Freeman-Moir
The sense of grandeur expressed in Genesis is under merciless attack from rapacious systems of capitalist production, marketing, and consumption...
Read moreGraham Bennett at Chambers Art Gallery
Dr. Warren Feeney
Graham Bennett’s Heed is an exhibition of replicated miniature railway signals that initially appear as though they have no intention of slowing down any anticipated traffic flows in a methodical and ordered manner. Instead, Bennett’s meticulously crafted sculptures seem to be frantically offering a warning; danger ahead—get your foot off the accelerator...
Read moreChanging the Global Gaze
Sally Blundell
Graham Bennett's intricate sculptures speak not only to human invention, the history of voyaging, and the realities of science, but also to the growing environmental catastrophe before us...
Read moreOn Our Heads Be It − This Not So Silent Spring
John Freeman-Moir
Each sketch imagines a world thick with ecological and moral perspective, redolent with human intention and interest—a world now in radical danger of being lost is called into view, a world urgently in need of nuturance, that must, as much as is possible, be restored. Each sketch says something about our place in the world and our response to it...
Read moreOur Water Our World
Shelley McMurtrie
The way we see and react to the world around us is influenced by our particular worldviews. My worldview is focussed by an ecological philosophy, which emphasises relationships between all living things and their physical environments. Looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights I am, therefore, struck by the seemingly hedonistic use of the garden’s plenitude of resources and the resulting collapse of an environment that the inhabitants’ very existence depends on...
Read moreHieronymus Bosch and His Garden of Warnings
Eefje Broere
Lust, anger, pride, envy, sloth, gluttony, and avarice: these are the Seven Deadly Sins, seven sins that are known universally. Even though we seem not to pay them as much attention nowadays, they were especially important in the everyday life and thinking of medieval Europe. After all, if a person gave in to these sins he or she was doomed to go to hell, or so Christians believed. Still, people tended to forget about them, as people do...
Read moreSublime Meeting of Minds
James Mack
This is an exhibition of minor miracles. Two artists, one a jeweller and one a sculptor, marry their minds and their work to create a near sublime Suzygistic art...
Read moreArt and Friendship
John Freeman-Moir
"Friends are indeed a help... to those in the prime of life, by enabling them to carry out fine achievements...
Read moreTurns and Returns
Robin Woodward
From towering figures to meticulously crafted miniatures, the distinctive sculptures of Graham Bennett traverse vast territories, exploring the connections between people and places, between cultural ideas, and the relationship of humankind with the ancient Earth itself. His quest turns and returns to voyaging, identity, our sense of place, not with statement but questions: turned, examined, reissued as a challenge to the viewer. Bennett is an observer of our time, leaning increasingly...
Read moreTribute to Firefighters
Rosa Shiels
In October 2002, Christchurch New Zealand hosted the Seventh World Firefighters Games. The world was still reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America the previous year and many frontline firefighters who had lost colleagues in the aftermath were in the city for what were renamed the Memorial Games. In April 2002, sculptor Graham Bennett accepted the commission to create a sculpture from sections of damaged World Trade Center...
Read moreAround Every Circle
Felicity Milburn
A spirit of curiosity and examination lies at the heart of Bennett’s approach, which avoids concrete statements in favour of enquiries and provocations. The questions embodied in his sculptures and drawings (and often literally written upon them) seek conversation rather than confirmation...
Read moreEver Not Quite
John Freeman-Moir
Across five decades Graham Bennett has wondered how feelings of anticipation, memory, recurrence, and transition might be expressed in the language of sculpture. In this respect, his sculptural works catch a sense of one of Immanuel Kant’s key aesthetic insights...
Read moreDemarcation
Felicity Milburn
When I think about the long arc of Graham Bennett’s art practice, one image persists. It’s a photograph of a work I never saw; one, in fact, that very few people experienced in its entirety. Demarcation (1996) was made from 300 open-sided iron cubes, hand cast and rusted dark-orange. Bennett placed them in a continuous line across the width of Nelson’s spectacular natural Boulder Bank, Te Taero a Kereopa / Te Tahuna a Tama-i-ea, which sweeps down...
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