Bill Culbert
Aotearoa New Zealand / England / France, b.1935, d.2019
Reflection 1
- 1971
- Light bulb, mirror glass and wood
- Purchased 1988
- 320 x 320 x 150mm
- 88/01
Tags: lamps (lighting devices), mirrors, reflections (perceived properties)
Bill Culbert’s high school art teacher asked his students to stand in a dark room, then went outside. The sunlight streamed through the keyhole, projecting a tiny image of him – upside down and waving – on the room’s far wall. From that moment, Culbert was excited by light’s power to transform how we see the world. These sculptures were some of the first he made exploring the possibilities of electric light. In Celeste, he placed a lightbulb into a dark box full of tiny holes, then put that inside a bigger Perspex box so that it generates multiple ‘ghost’ bulbs on the outside. Reflection 1 tests the line between reality and illusion, as another bulb repeats itself into infinity. Culbert liked ordinary, everyday materials best, believing they left more room for the imagination.
(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)
Exhibition History
In Reflections 1 William (Bill) Culbert explored the aesthetic concepts of light, shape, space and energy. He is asking the viewer to take a fresh look at the common light bulb and think about the phenomenon of reflection.
From the early 1970s Culbert made works exploring the qualities of light by ‘capturing’ it within light bulbs, wine glasses, lampshades, window frames, fluorescent tubes and plastic bottles. This use of such common consumer objects relates to the idea of the ‘ready-made’, pioneered by artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881 -1973) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968).
Culbert was born in Dunedin and studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts from 1953 to 1956. He left New Zealand in 1957 on a National Art Gallery scholarship to study painting at the Royal College of Art, London. Culbert was one of New Zealand’s most internationally recognised artists. He exhibited widely in international venues, including the Millennium Dome, London. He died in 2019.
Related
Notes
The Sculpture Collection
The first encounter most Robert McDougall Art Gallery visitors have with the Sculpture Collection is passing Ex Tenebris Lux (1937), Ernest George Gillick's bronze figure of a reading woman, on their way to the Gallery's front entrance. This work's title and subject, symbolising enlightenment and literally translated as "from darkness, light", is an appropriate maxim for an art museum, but Gillick's sculpture has another, historical, significance. Originally sited within the Sculpture Court (now called the Centre Court) of the Gallery, Ex Tenebris Lux was donated in 1938 by local biscuit manufacturer Robert E. McDougall, who had gifted the funds to build Christchurch's public Art Gallery almost ten years before.