Rāwene NorthTec arts tutor Glen Hayward wins Sculpture Prize

Media Release - 9 July 2013

Rāwene NorthTec arts tutor Glen Hayward wins $30,000 Te Papa Sculpture Prize

The Rāwene-based NorthTec Arts tutor and renowned New Zealand sculptor Dr.Glen Hayward has scored the prestigious National Te Papa museum $30,000 4 Plinths Sculpture Project commission.

Inspired by his time as the Rita Angus artist- in-residence at her Thorndon home in Wellington in 2012, Glen’s submission to Te Papa for the four two-metre high plinths is titled: “Rita Angus Used to Grow Her Own Vegetables”.

“I’m delighted to win this commission and be able to work on this project as a tribute to Rita Angus,” Glen says.

“There are volunteers in Wellington who look after the gardens at the Rita Angus cottage, they pick up pieces of old crockery from her garden and collect them in a jar. To me it reflected the people curating those pieces rather than some academic.

“I’ll be sculpting the works in my studio here in Hokianga, scaling up the pottery pieces by a factor of fifty, carving them macrocarpa and painting the details. Once done, we’ll be freighting the works down to Wellington where they will sit on the Waterfront in temporary residence for two years.”

Glen says he was pleasantly surprised to win the project commission given the quality of artists he was competing against.

“There were eight or nine submissions and it came down to two of us, Richard Reddaway (artist, writer and curator who works at the Massey University School of Fine Arts) and me,” he says.

“I actually though he would get it because he is senior to me, and given that I had studied him at art school.”

He says his approach to his art is to treat it as a “conversation” which he has done over the past decade by constantly displaying and presenting his works in the public sphere.

“It has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride because I’ve constantly been putting my work out there,” Glen, who holds a doctorate in fine arts from Auckland University, says.

One of his prime goals for the plinths project is to have those engaging viewers and the public on a spatial level.

“I want to do it so that it acknowledges the place of the viewer, that they are rewarded whether up close and looking from underneath, looking from a mid-distance or potentially viewed from above via Google maps,” he adds.

The NorthTec tutor has a number of awards to his name including the KaiparaFoundation Wallace Trust Award which won him a three-month residency at the Altes Spital in Solothurn, Switzerland. “There is a special thing going on here at NorthTec Rāwene my role in this environment is to bring the ideas and challenges that come from awards and opportunities and make them accessible to the students.”

Hayward recently completed an exhibition at the City Gallery in Wellington, a replica of an office cubicle from the film the Matrix, a work that will be on display at the Christchurch Art Gallery in mid-September and then onto Auckland in November.

Scale model of proposed plinths.

ENDS

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