Foundation Study .01 Craft
In Foundation Study .01 Craft, a waka lies stranded, abandoned – a vessel from a past journey, an anthropological relic, a sign of how we may have got here. Grant Wylie’s interlocking blocks of cast concrete form a rhythmical interplay of positive and negative shapes spanning the length of the sculpture. The grid, with its topological potential, is broken up into pieces, then reassembled to create a dynamic analysis of both structure and place. The distance from prow to hull is made up of these multiple blocks that expand and contract the inherent dimensions of the waka. The prow and hull echo the pattern of the interconnecting blocks as they jut into space, creating further possibilities within the format of the infinite grid.
The figurative elements placed on either side of the waka are loaded with visual references relating to Rangi (sky) and Papa (earth), sun and moon, male and female, and the two fleeing characters in Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon – Arowhena and the heroic interloping narrator of the story. They suggest elements of entrapment, of an inner emotional life activated by a desire to both escape and understand one’s history.
The sculpture is hard-edged, yet somehow fluid. It is machine-like, yet made by hand (crafted). It is hollow and solid, almost feminine in its shape. Indeed, the two accompanying sculptures are reminiscent of caryatids, the female sculptural figures that served as architectural supports or columns in the ancient world.
Foundation Study .01 Craft includes references to the past, to journeys undertaken and forsaken, to an imaginary land in Butler’s high country (as indicated by the waka’s rusting label ‘xrxwhon’), to ourselves and how we navigate the world. Although it appears to have lost its former functionality and is now detritus, the waka remains a vast and visible object, however dislocated and weathered by time. Wylie often invents alternative systems of operating in the world in order to question the validity and efficacy of bureaucratic hierarchies: this is seen in his former works Department of Labour, Asset # 305 (2000) and Savage Hardy & Associate: contingencies and bottom lines (2003) in which his alter ego offered a critique of patronising colonial officialdom.
Wylie also makes myriad references to Dadaism, Cubism and Primitivism. It is as though he has discovered an apparently simple yet essentially complex template for word and image association, cleverly grafting the traditional with the new.
In Foundation Study .01 Craft Wylie explores the materiality of concrete. A mixture of stone and earth, it is mixed, poured, cast and then constructed like children’s building blocks to form an architectural base, a foundation of a thought upon which to project his investigation of place. The waka’s weight means it could never float, let alone chart a course across water, yet its construction suggests a fictional voyage of the mind.
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