DARK VUECCANO — A MECCANO-INSPIRED SCULPTURE
In early 2020, Paul Cockburn, the general manager of Caffe L’affare, asked me to be part of the small group of New Zealand artists who would do an art piece/study of one of the cafe’s long-term staff to appear on one of its coffee bags.
The project
For me, the project had three parts: the design for a coffee bag label, a large sculptural piece, and the shooting of 12 stereo images with a 1960s Russian Sputnik Bakelite camera using Kodak E100 slide film.
The interactive steel sculptural tower I built — 2.1m high, 1.3m wide, and 1.2m deep — was inspired by the children’s constructor system, Meccano.
The viewer stands at the sculpture and peers into binocular eyepieces to view 12, 3D transparent photographic images of the bush, of damaged habitat, and of endangered birds. The tower itself is metaphorically the lone remnant of an ancient forest giant, a harbinger of doom, while I envisaged the stereo disc as the sombre-coloured head and eyes of a mutated iridescent extinct bird alone, the last bird left standing, the end of the line.
However, a new brief from L’affare towards the end of the project called for the ‘damaged habitat’ images to be replaced by portraits of the 12 artists who were involved in the rebranding project. This I did.
The contraption
The sculpture ended up looking like some contraption from the 19th century — it certainly is not of modern times. I think my intention was to create something with a unique voice and an entry point for the viewer, via the not-so-distant echo of a child’s Meccano set.
The look, the materials, the patina? My family had many books that showed grainy sepia photos of 19th century shipyards, steam engines, and working men and women operating or building astounding machines and tools. These items often seemed to have a beauty that was not required for them to function: elegant castings, huge riveted steel sheets, hand-wrought objects, exposed chains, cams, wheels, and giant switches, gate valves with elegant giant cast handles, smoke and steam and convoluted pipework. Some of
