Aluminium skin

The sculpture is made from cast aluminium. The work’s title suggests that it might map the contours of a body, although it also evokes a geographical cross-section – with forms that could have been cut directly from the land.

Christine Hellyar made Aluminium skin when she was a student at the Elam School of Art. As a child growing up in New Plymouth, Hellyar had spent a lot of time on Mt Taranaki. The view from the mountain, looking down on the world, is reflected in early sculptural works like this one. Hellyar describes these works as "flat things with landscape shapes", but she is also quick to say that she "didn’t want that God thing which goes on in McCahon and a lot of Renaissance art, where the view of the landscape is from above. I wanted to get ‘down here’." (Art New Zealand, issue 142/ Winter 2012, P.36.)

Those ideas are clear in Aluminium skin. There is an intimacy to the forms of this sculpture, and to its pitted, metal surface. The use of an industrial material recalls the interaction between humans and the natural environment, interrogating the intimate physical relationship between people and the land.