Work shows fascination with water over years
Fran Dibble’s raindrops pay homage to water — a simple natural phenomena familiar to us all, but also important, precious and powerful. A fascination with water is evident in Dibble’s artworks over the decades, including her latest exhibition at Zimmerman Art Gallery.
Stormy Weather features two large oil paintings and a number of small raindrops.
Most of these small raindrops are gilded, emphasising their existence as small valuable keepsakes of this simple common phenomena. But Dibble says the message is bittersweet: “the drops also stand as warning signs for the future, a reminder of the environmental issues of our age.”
Some of the drops are left as simple elegant shapes; others are decorated with words or imagery.
Water in a stylised drop form first appeared in Dibble’s paintings in the late 1980s.
“The drop is a shape we all recognise, but is nothing like the actual form water has when it falls. Rather the drop is like a logo or hieroglyphic, a symbol of water rather than a realistic interpretation — instantly recognisable, yet scientifically implausible.”
In subsequent paintings, Dibble’s fascination with water is evident in the variety of forms in which she has portrayed it, including as cloud-filled skies, giant seas, enlarged microscopic splashes, bubbles in a glass and even, in one work, as steam from an iron.
“These works honoured water as the basis of life, the most useful of solvents, and as a powerful force shaping landscapes, with rivers carving rock to make mountains and valleys, lakes and seas.”
Yet despite her multiple portrayals of water, the single drop has endured in the Palmerston North artist’s practice and, in recent years, leapt out of the paintings to assume sculptural form.
In 2012, a large fibreglass drop was central to the artist’s installation With the power to move mountains and carve valleys . . . . The giant drop was juxtaposed against sand pillars with carved tops, reflecting on how something as commonplace as water has a grandiose effect in creating the landscape.
Fast forward 10 years, and the same large fibreglass drop provided the pattern for the large bronze sculpture installed outside Zimmerman Art Gallery.
The 2m-tall gilded bronze raindrop was installed by the gallery in March. No public funds were involved in its acquisition or installation.
The drop is inscribed with the words “In still ponds the universe is reflected”. This message contemplates, on one hand, that a still pond reflects the universe above it. But also, within a still pond, a whole universe of life goes unnoticed.
It was English poet and painter William Blake who proposed we could see the world in a grain of sand; so too a single droplet holds a greater truth to all life.
The exhibition runs until November 27.