Paul Dibble 'Female Figure'

“My work is grounded in figuration, beginning with recognisable subjects and shapes, which I then abstract to a point where the form takes precedence. The play between positive and negative space is also important in my work.”

Paul Dibble

Born in Thames in 1943, Paul Dibble is perhaps this country’s most well-known and accomplished sculptor. He graduated from Elam School of Arts in 1967, where he studied under Colin McCahon, A. Lois White and Jim Allen. Soon after he would work with McCahon and modernist architect James Hackshaw, creating religious art for Catholic churches in and around Auckland.

Working primarily in bronze and grounded in the twentiethcentury European sculptural tradition, his leitmotifs include organic lines, richly burnished patinas, and an innate sense of balance, proportion and harmony. He refined his practice for over half a century, never far from the production of his own work as one of a select few sculptors to cast his own work from the foundry he shared with his wife Fran, in Palmerston North.

His work as an art teacher took him to Palmerston North initially, where he set up a home workshop in 1990, teaching himself how to use Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) for arc welding to create precise and clean joins for his bronze forms. He worked and lived there until his passing last year, leaving behind a vast and unmatched legacy of public and private sculpture, perhaps capped most notably by the ‘New Zealand War Memorial’ (2006) in Hyde Park in London, which commemorates the New Zealand and British lives lost in the two world wars.

Female Figure (2003) is classic Dibble with its implied sense of movement, anticipated action and latent emotion. Appearing full of form from the front but as a sharp silhouette side on, Dibble’s female forms have always dispelled notions of female passivity. Female Figure feels distinctively of the Pacific and Dibble’s best work has always foregrounded Pacific mythologies and native flora and fauna, despite its roots in the European sculpture of Russian constructivist sculptors including Alexander Archipenko. In a vast and varied oeuvre, it was the human form that most captured the artist, returning to it time and time again. The shape and expressiveness of the form here is further heightened by the subject’s wind-blown hair which creates an impressive dynamism. Notches to the edge of the figure and the cut-out breast area introduce a negative space and along with the sculptor’s signature flattened three dimensionality, bring a weightlessness to the bronze mass.

Ben Plumbly