Meld. From the series: House Alterations

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1978 Neil Dawson produced a series of fifteen small sculptures entitled ‘House alterations’. They were constructed from simple materials including wood, nylon mesh and piano wire, and painted in a
stripped-back palette of red, white and black. In each work, Dawson explored a spatial or perceptual conundrum, mirroring, stretching, enlarging, fl ipping or otherwise manipulating the generic shape of the house. When they were first exhibited at the Brooke/Giff ord Gallery in Christchurch, the houses were attached to the wall at diff erent heights and allowed to occupy unexpected places, their position determined by their ideal vantage point.

Some works were compact and solid, others weightless and seemingly drawn in space. Each was succinctly named: Glow, Elongation, Meld, Focus, Illumination and Reversal. These modest objects represented an important shift in Dawson’s practice. After graduating from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1970 and further study in Melbourne, he had established a reputation for intricate, highly finished conceptual sculptures. By the late 1970s, however, he had become increasingly disenchanted with what he saw as ‘self indulgent and esoteric’ art which had ‘nothing to do with life and nothing to do with anybody else’s life’.

The ‘House alterations’ series signalled a desire to connect with a broader audience. ‘It was like I was producing a small catalogue of the ideas that I’d been working on,’ Dawson said. ‘I mean they
were just aspects of the elaborate works I had been doing. I was trying to dissect them and lay them out in such a simple fashion that I thought “if they don’t get this, they’ll get nothing and I’ll become
an athlete!”.’1

In this, the ‘House alterations’ series set the blueprint for Dawson’s subsequent career, particularly his large-scale, site-specific public sculptures. In works like Vanity, 1988, a series of enormous feathers
that sat and twirled on the roof of the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Globe, 1989, a model of the world first shown at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, as part of the exhibition Magiciens de la terre; and
Ferns, 1998, suspended above Wellington’s Civic Square, Dawson’s ability to make complex and confounding spectacles that are nonetheless arresting and instantly accessible appears on a grand scale.

Aaron Kreisler

1 Neil Dawson, cited in Jim and Mary Barr, Neil Dawson: Site works 1981–89, National Art Gallery, 1989, p. 66.

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Neil Dawson’s ‘House Alterations’

If there’s one thing all New Zealanders can relate to, it’s the ‘little wooden house’. That was Neil Dawson’s thinking when he made these art works in 1978. Disenchanted with what he called ‘self-indulgent’ sculpture, Dawson created these toy-like objects to reach a broad audience.

There is something familiar about these scenes: light spilling from a doorway, a pair of identical houses, a stairway to a secret tower. Dawson made them on a small scale so they’d be portable - but also because he had to. He didn’t have a studio at the time, so his sculptures needed to be small enough to build on his desk at home.