The Walcha Sculpture symposium has finished, and for an outlay of $20,000 in nominal artist fees, Walcha now owns more than $150,000 worth of sculpture which will be added to the town’s art collection.
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Matt Pilkington, the artist in residence with Armidale’s Backtrack Boys, finished a Tallowood work called ‘Hairy Men’ a concept he credits the boys assisting him with. He said he took part in the event to promote art in the community and loved working with the other artists, and making friends for life.
“I think art is really important in society and if we didn’t have art we’d be a pretty sad bunch of people I reckon,” he said.
if we didn’t have art we’d be a pretty sad bunch of people
- Matt Pilkington - Backtrack artist in residence
The other artists all agreed that the week of working alongside each other and exchanging ideas was rewarding experience.
Four sculptures were produced in record time, and the usual price for each invited artist’s commissioned public work averages between $30,000 and $60,000.
While the week was valuable in terms of camaraderie, the given time frame and solid timber materials supplied proved a challenge and tested each artist’s adaptability.
Dale Miles used Stringybark for his architectural work, Nameer Davis and Barbara Penrose produced a play on light using timber from an old bridge and Caz Haswell created a delicate timber work.
Nameer Davis and Barbara Penrose found the process using the reclaimed bridge timber challenging, and they said they were grateful for Stephen King’s chainsaw work and James Rogers construction advice.
“As an artist, you tend to live and work fairly isolatedly, and with a fixed lifestyle, so to have a week where you are constantly interrupted and engaging with others in a different environment has been great,” said Mr Davis.
Ms Penrose said she also found the condensing of the collaborative duo’s usual timeframe of one month into five days exciting.
“Basically it turned out to be what we wanted which is what is so weird,” she said. “We came down with this idea and knew kind of what we wanted, and here it is in a week.”
Dale Miles lives in the Sutherland Shire in Sydney and has been a professional sculptor creating work for public exhibition since he was 12 years old.
“I was fortunate to have a neighbour, Dennis Adams, who had been an official World War II artist and he trained me in his studio where I worked on public commissions with him,” Mr Miles explained.
During the Walcha Symposium, Mr Miles created a relief sculpture that can be viewed in the round.
You are getting a cumulative mass of top quality works here, and that is only going to help to attract more
- Artist Dale Miles
“It is an architectural image derived from a drawing which I extruded into a sculpture using Walcha’s own Stringybark,” he said.
“I normally use softer woods from the south coast – this is more like working in iron because its great quality is it is really hard and reliable so you can work in ways you can’t with the softer wood. Usually, I would take four months to do a work of this scale, so I had to change some of my techniques to fit the timeframe.”
Mr Miles said it was well worth his while taking part in the symposium.
“It is so attractive to have a piece in Walcha because I know about Walcha and the works that are here,” he said.
“Many artists want their work to be in a place that it is firstly appreciated deeply where the people are highly cultured and interested, and then on top of that to be around the other works that are very good. You are getting a cumulative mass of top quality works here, and that is only going to help to attract more.”