Public art makes people think

Last week a new artwork was unveiled outside the MTG in Napier. The piece, Ivy, is by British sculptor Tony Cragg who is reputably one of the greatest living sculptors in the world and was donated to the people of Hawke’s Bay by Reydan Weiss in memory of her husband Roger.

A very generous gift to the city, given the value Cragg’s works expect at auction. So it is interesting to consider why the Weiss family have invested so much in this artwork and why they believe putting art in the city’s streets is of such benefit to the people who live there.

Nga Toi Hawke’s Bay chairman Dick Grant spoke to this question at the opening of the work saying: “Public art makes people stop and look and think about their relationship to space, place and other people in a way that we don’t normally, as we go about our lives. Public art enhances cityscapes, adds diversity to the landscape, reflects the relationship between man and nature, and helps to define our own concept of the way we live.”

In my view if we actively follow the artist and the ideas in his work we are offered new ideas and experiences by this sculpture.

Cragg’s strange abstract stacks like Ivy deal with the bigger questions in the universe, translating mathematical ideas into something ultimately organic, perhaps even emotional, all the while being an extremely complicated geometric composition.