Sculpted metaphors _{by Isabella Smith}

Terry Stringer ONZM is a canonical figure of contemporary Aotearoa art whose practice spans half a century. The artist is known for his bronze, figurative sculptures that explore human forms, often distorting and sloping their dimensions across a flat plane. To celebrate his 80^th birthday, the sculptor’s long-time friend and curator Mark Hutchins-Pond has selected touchstones of the stylistic and thematic evolutions of his work, both two and three dimensional, which are currently on display at Page Galleries until the 14^th of November.

The title of the exhibition, CONTINUITIES: Stringer’s Stringers – 1990 to 2025, reflects the way the artist views his practice as a continuous exploration of the human condition through the metaphor of sculpture. The works are from Terry’s personal archival collection, which he began for his own reference in the early 1990s.

“Each work expresses something of what he has personally experienced in the complex and chaotic world we live in as well as his observations of how others navigate this problematic minefield of human existence in these times,” Hutchins-Pond says. “But each new work he creates is an expression and exploration of new ideas, so there is always more to learn and discover.”   

With references to classical sculpture, renaissance art, and cubism, Stringer incorporates “what are often quite complex narratives into his sculptures”.

What is most rewarding about Stringer’s sculptures is the experience of viewing them from different perspectives and witnessing how their axes shift like a wobbling top. With the concept of a ‘peephole’ as a recurring theme in a number of the works, it “subtly echoes the curatorial intent of the CONTINUITIES exhibition: to tantalisingly reveal hidden secrets to a privileged few through elaborately ritualistic means.”