New Zealander, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in England fromc.1970, in France from 1981.
Born 1935, in Port Chalmers.
Sculptor of assemblages.
Bill Culbert studied at the Royal College of Art in London which, at that time, was at the forefront of developments in experimental sculpture. From ...
[William] (Franklin)
(b Port Chalmers, Jan 23, 1935).
New Zealand photographer, sculptor, installation artist, and painter, active also in France and Great Britain. Culbert consistently explored the workings of both natural and artificial light in his works, as well as the transformation of found objects and materials. A student at Hutt Valley High School, his artistic ability was fostered by the radical art educator James Coe. From 1953 to 1956, Culbert studied at the Canterbury University College School of Art in Christchurch. Moving to London in 1957 to attend the Royal College of Art, he became interested in the photographic works of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, while his paintings were informed by Cubism. In 1961 Culbert moved to Croagnes in Provence, France; he remained in France and the UK for the rest of his career.
During 1967–8, Culbert shifted his focus from the analysis of form and light in painting to the analysis of actual light, often arranging light bulbs in grid formations. In ...
(b Hastings, March 21, 1930; d New Plymouth, Dec 8, 2011).
New Zealand sculptor, painter, printmaker, and installation artist. His art primarily involves assemblage, often with an eye to colour relationships; it also incorporates diverse sources including American modernism, African, and Asian art. Driver had little formal training and worked as a dental technician before he began sculpting with wood, clay, and dental plaster during the 1950s. Between 1960 and 1964 he produced assemblages and collages reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg, though Driver was not aware of the American’s work then (e.g. Large Brass). In the United States from March to August 1965, he developed an interest in Post-painterly Abstraction as well as in Jasper Johns’s works. References to New York are manifest in his mixed-media wall relief La Guardia 2 (1966; Auckland, A.G.). The Painted Reliefs (1970–74) with their horizontal panels and strips of varying width and depth, mostly painted but sometimes aluminium, indicate the impact of American abstraction, notably that of Kenneth Noland. ...
(b Singapore, July 12, 1959).
Malaysian conceptual artist, active also in Australia. Gill studied at the University of Western Sydney, completing her MA in 2001. Despite working in a range of media, she is best understood as a process-based artist who has consistently explored notions of migration and transformation within material culture. These include the effects of international trade on such everyday activities as cooking and eating. The spiral form of Forking Tongues (1992; Brisbane, Queensland A.G.), for example, entwines Western cutlery and dried chillies from the Americas and Asia, highlighting how foods and utensils from across the globe have come together to transform local cuisines and inform culinary habits. Gill’s later photographic series refer to other understandings of migration, such as the spread of the English language or of capitalist desire throughout South-east Asia in recent decades. For Forest (1998; Sydney, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery; see Chua), Gill cut out words and sentences from books written in English, placed the texts within tropical landscapes and photographed the results before the books’ paper began rotting into the humid environment. For ...
Australian, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in France from 1979.
Born 1948, in Melbourne.
Sculptor, installation artist.
Land Art.
Christine O'Loughlin studied Literature and Philosophy in Australia before winning a scholarship to attend the school of fine art in Kyoto from 1974 to 1979. In ...
(b Freetown, Sierra Leone, Dec 14, 1965).
Australian installation artist, born in Sierra Leone. Resident in Australia from 1972, Piccinini graduated in 1988 from the Australian National University, Canberra, with a BA and then from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1991 with a BA (Painting). She produced images and objects that embodied imaginary evolutionary jumps and mutations (see, for example, The Young Family; see image page for more views). To produce these, she worked in a succession of new, novel materials and media: from synthetic resins, plastics and silicone developed for special effects in movies to the digital manipulation used in commercial photography and animation. In her 1997 series of photographs, Protein Lattice, a naked female plays with a large hairless rat with an enlarged human ear growing from its back. The work combined the highly contrived language of mainstream fashion photography, brightly lit, glossy and free of imperfection, with an animal that appeared to be one of the hybrid clones then emerging from laboratories. Both glossy-haired model and mutant rat appear equally artificial and equally indebted to technology....
(b Ashburton, Christchurch, 1966).
New Zealand sculptor, painter, printmaker, and installation artist of Maori descent. Robinson trained as a sculptor at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch (1985–8). He had artist residencies in Germany and Australia and held guest lectureships in the US, Sweden, and Denmark. He took up the post of Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2003.
Robinson gained early attention for his provocative paintings and sculptures exploring ethnic identity politics and international art careerism. In the ‘Percentage Paintings’ from 1993 he appeared to question his positioning as Maori artist and his 3.125% Maori ‘blood’. His ironic commentaries on the commodification of indigenous artists employed text and image using oil sticks in a crude style as well as the reds, whites, and blacks of Maori art. Strategic Plan (1998; Auckland, A.G) features a Maori tiki-like motif, adopts a wall-chart approach, and outlines ‘tips’ for artists. His ambiguous sculptures often used motifs from travel technology, such as the ...
The final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century witnessed an increasing propensity for artists to incorporate aspects of science in their own art. In many fields of scientific research—including the cloning of mammals, the genetic modification of crops, the creation of bioengineered organs and tissues, advances in nanotechnology and robotics, experimental research in how the human mind works and the study of artificial intelligence—the frontiers of knowledge pushed outward at an accelerated pace. In the spirit of creative inquiry, or in order to critique the goals and outcomes of scientific experimentation and application, artists regularly borrowed subjects, tools and approaches from science as a means to the production of art ( see fig. ).
In documenting and assessing the achievements of visual artists engaged with science, there was no broad consensus on the categorisation of artists’ work across the full range of activities, methods, motivations and use of materials. Assessments of artistic practice focused on artists’ work categorised by the traditional fields of science (e.g. artists who explore biology, artists who explore physical sciences). Other analyses of artistic practice focused on categories of art media (e.g. artists who use traditional means such as carving and casting to represent scientific discoveries, artists who explore and employ biological materials and scientific instruments)....
New Zealander, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in Great Britain.
Born 3 July 1947, in Christchurch.
Sculptor (mixed media), photographer, film maker.
Boyd Webb studied at Ilam School of Art, Christchurch, New Zealand (1968-1971), and at the Royal College of Art, London (...
British, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1947, in Samoa.
Sculptor, installation artist.
New British Sculpture.
Richard Wentworth studied at Hornsey College of Art in London from 1965, worked with the sculptor Henry Moore in 1967, and studied at the Royal College of Art in London ...
