glimpses of work from his residency in Okayama, Japan, 2024
Graham Bennett
8 November - 7 December 2024
How should we live in a fractured world? What connects and divides us? Internationally recognised NZ sculptor Graham Bennett explored these concepts during a major residency in Japan this year. An extraordinary body of work evolved: elegant, thoughtful sculpture and painted studies, highighting our global fragility - across technology, social issues, political, environmental and historical questions. Can we hold together and avoid the abyss?
How should we live in a fractured world? What connects and divides us?
Internationally recognised NZ sculptor Graham Bennett explored these concepts during a major residency in Japan this year. An extraordinary body of work evolved: elegant, thoughtful sculpture and painted studies, highighting our global fragility – across technology, social issues, political, environmental and historical questions. Can we hold together and avoid the abyss?
Two installations of Fracture resulted, in places of significance to prominent Japanese artists. The Diversion Gallery is honoured to show the latest iterations of this series, with studies and photographs of the installations for the first time in New Zealand – casting a different shadow from the meanings carried in Japan, embedding the connections Bennett has long made across the Pacific.
There’s a homage to Japanese tradition and origami in the process – seemingly strong yet infinitely delicate, so we might wonder how they hold together. Like the Earth, in fact… Even the materials used, traditional Kakishibu finishes, are organic.
The exhibition flows from Bennett’s major Axis and Axes at the Canterbury Museum, with new iterations of the sought-after Disrupt axe works, now dark and intense, carrying powerful stories of New Zealand, connections between cultures, and the edge of unforseen change.
We are privileged to exhibit Ukabu 2006, a sublime collaboration between Graham Bennett and Wataru Hamasaka, Emeritus Professor of Sculpture at Kurashiki University, Japan. Its title meaning to float, rise, appear, be saved, come to mind. It has been exhibited in major public art gallery exhibitions, and featured in World Sculpture News magazine’s cover story in 2014.