Sir Grahame Sydney’s Stringer speech to the Northern Club

Sir Grahame Sydney spoke at the Northern Club on 15 September, introducing the book Stringer: The art of Terry Stringer edited by Linda Tyler. Read his remarks in full here:

‘It may seem a little unusual that a tee-total painter like me is breaking the champagne bottle at the launch of a book about a sculptor. What would I know , after all? Terry has been nudging me for many years to come and make a sculpture with him, but I can’t even think of what I would do, let alone imagine, then shape it into life. I have been in awe of him  since I saw my first Stringer pieces decades ago and it is simple but true to say I don’t know how he does it.

But what I do know is that no matter how insignificant the part, anyone would surely prize an opportunity to be associated with this  exceptional artist and this truly magnificent book.

Stringer the book is beautiful in its carefully considered, sophisticated and splendidly presented 
account of the  life’s work of one of our very best, most distinctive  creative forces, and  knowing a little of its hesitant origins and tortured passage towards this launching, I am thrilled for Terry, for Tim, for Nicola and the Massey University Press team and all associated with its production that such perfect justice has  finally been done to such a deserving man.

This is not the occasion for a lecture. This is a  well-earned celebration. At last we have a fabulous book revealing the extraordinary creative life of what in this country is close to an endangered species
– a sculptor.

How many significant NZ sculptors can you name ? Two or three ? Five at best ? It’s a tiny roll-call compared to the painters. Many of us love to travel to the capitals of  Europe and marvel at the astonishing public sculptures which populate city squares, streets , gardens and public buildings , monuments to their age and the superlative, baffling skill of their makers. They add immeasurable delight and fascination to those places,  they remind us of glorious  and confident past eras, of lost history,  and in their permanence they  remind us of our own brief lives

In Florence tourists line up to have their photographs taken in front of Michelangelo’s “David”  or Cellini’s “Perseus”, or  in Rome the astonishing Pieta in the Vatican; in Paris and London they send home snapshots saying “Here I am with Rodin’s “Thinker” or “The Burghers of Calais”, or  Edwin Landseer’s  imposing lions in Trafalgar Square.

Here in NZ  busloads of puzzled Asian tourists  take selfies in front of Taihape’s enormous gumboot, Paeroa’s towering bottle of fizz,  Gore’s fibreglass leaping trout,  Cromwell’s monumentally garish fresh fruit on sticks or  Ohakune’s ludicrous carrot, whose builders have  all sensibly ducked for cover and rejoice in their anonymity. These monuments to bad taste and our shallow history would be comical if
they weren’t so embarrassing.

Every  small town seems to boast a WW 1 memorial to dead soldiers, but save for one day each year no-one pays much attention to them, and their creators are  unknown

Yes there are one or two notably  impressive works by Terry and his now departed colleague in bronze Paul Dibble   or by Llew Summers perhaps, in public places, and now one or two pieces lending some
interest to the new underground rail system here in Auckland;  and  there are one or  two private sculpture parks for the privileged few,   but their major stars  are mostly foreign to us. There are  rare sculpture walks if you know where to find them, but in general we are a nation  sadly starved of public sculpture telling the story of our  times, our  culture and  our  unique place in the world.

Most of our few sculptors’ works are hidden away in private homes, smaller scale of necessity; it takes the patronage of a bold and  brave Council or fortunately funded individuals to get something bigger cast, and there are  precious few of both.

Its in this thin soil that Terry has  determinedly  managed a  career of nearly 60 years making such recognisable testaments to the human body in space as only he can make them  - always refined, polished, and   distinctively stylised, often  surprising in their visual puzzles and  clever entwining of different allusions.

As Terry himself has said,  “ My statues stand on parade in a long line reaching back to past eras. They represent a remembering of classical elegance and heroic monumentality.”

In my eyes bronze always brings with it a connection to the Renaissance. Like marble, we know instinctively that it defies time and will be the same tomorrow and in  centuries to come as it is today.

Stringer’s  bronzes are  so inescapably HIS, and if great art is always a  reflection, a mirror of its maker, then looking hard at Terry’s creations should tell us plenty about HIM.

And they do.

He is himself  refined, polished and intelligent. He is a contained individual, considered and thoughtful – not given to impulsivity or flamboyance.  I think the word “fastidious” could be applied to Terry, in the most positive of ways. And while he doesn’t leave much to chance, he does have a secret sense of adventure , which leads to surprising revelations, just like his sculptures

Terry loves to be at work, and working as a sculptor must, with other skilled tradesmen – studio assistants, engineers, builders, the admirable foundrymen who are so vital to his practice.

He also loves the theatrical side of life -  stage costuming, the fantasy of opera and plays. You will find the word “theatre” frequently appearing in the titles of his work, the theatre being a place of make believe and pretence to help us appreciate real life in all its  complexity and mystery.

In his work Terry plays with perception and distortion,  often riffing on classical themes, adding his
own  voice to that long chorus singing through centuries. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes more than a little disturbing, what do they say about their maker?

If I put you in front of, say, five or six pieces of Stringer sculpture and ask  you to tell me what sort of  personality created these, I think you’d come up with a pretty accurate description of the Terry I know, and Tim knows so much better. That’s when you  know you’re in the presence of  genuine high quality
Art.

As I said earlier Sculpture is not an art form common to many lives in NZ, but Terry’s work and this book  about it will together help elevate appreciation for this endangered practice. It takes many forms, shaped by different personalities, different eras and cultures, different motivations, and it is received in different ways.

The ascerbic Cyril Connelly said that  to him “sculpture is nothing  but  mud pies which endure.”

Auguste Rodin, that great French master, claimed that “sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.”

And I love the story of the the famous artist who, when asked how he managed to make the striking sculpture of a charging elephant they were unveiling, said “It was simple. I just took a big block of marble and chipped away all the chunks which didn’t look like an elephant.”

Terry, though,  is a builder upper, not a chipper-away man. He builds with clay. I myself have no idea what to make out of a lump of clay in my hands. Terry has always known what to make, and he does it brilliantly, one work leading to the next.

The book will tell you all about his childhood and formative years – being born in  St Ives in Cornwall,
coming to NZ aged 5 to live in the  then rural paradise of Waiheke, the only boy in a ballet class, making plasticene figures in Primary School, the always supportive Mum and Dad, Auckland Grammar days, Elam Art School and  friends made, the failed teacher, the  years as a postie and a cleaner, his first encounters with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, his  early exhibitions  and the growing instinct for “imaginative distortion,” his fortunate meeting with his life-long partner Tim McWhannell in
1981, and the  steady evolution of a serious, hard-won career.

Its all there, written so well by an impressive team : by Linda Tyler, by Peter Simpson and Mark Stocker, Jane Usher, Mark Hutchins-Pond, by Andrew Douglas and Robin Woodward, and by Terry himself.

The photographs by Jane Usher and Haru Sameshima are simply stunning. Just like the work they memorialise.

There has been welcome recognition before:   Terry has collected  many awards  along the way and and an  ONZM which Tim tells me Terry wears to bed every night.

But I think this book is more significant than them all.

A book like this is a legacy book – a superb and appropriate testament to Terry’s unique ability and his determinedly individual, distinctive vision , sustained  resolutely for nearly six decades now.  Almost a lifetime. It will prove decisively that Ad Reinhart was quite wrong when he said that “ Sculpture is  just something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.”

I’m thrilled for you Terry : you deserve this legacy.  Just like those works of classical elegance and heroic monumentality  you love so much, your art has joined that long  historical parade . It will outlive us all and stand proud down the years to come.

So will this book.

If it doesn’t scoop up a bunch of awards I’ll put down my brushes and pick up that lump of clay, and remain totally bewildered -  and immensely impressed - by what you can do and have done.’