'Vacant lot of cabbages' 1978

In 1978 Barry Thomas installed an environmental sculpture on the demolished Duke of Edinburgh/Roxy theatre site in the centre of Wellington: a plantation of 180 cabbages planted to spell out the word ‘CABBAGE’. It attracted widespread attention and remained, unvandalised, for several months. Thomas’s work engendered a range of activities on the site, culminating in a week-long festival when the cabbages were ceremonially harvested.

'Vacant lot of cabbages' has been described by Chris Trotter as ‘a conceptual artistic statement against the life-negating conservatism of the Muldoon years [which] quite literally grew into a life-affirming (and edible) challenge to Wellington's bureaucratic soul.’ (Dominion Post, 20 August 2010).

Also in 1978, Thomas mounted a record of the work in an exhibition of the Artist’s Co-op at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. (Other members of the Artist’s Co-op, a Wellington group, included Ian Hunter, Eva Yuen, Ross Boyd and Terrence Handscombe).

Barry Thomas’s Vacant lot of cabbages of 1978, photographs Note: This material has been selected from a larger collection offered by the artist.