Peter D. Cole
New Sculptures 2007
17 October - 3 November 2007
Peter D. Cole - New Sculpture 2007
Landscape Studio Space Form
John Buckley
On a clear night the southern sky over Kyneton is huge, indigo dark and bright stars. This is where the Australian artist Peter D Cole chooses to live and work, in a house and adjoining studio which is built from the local bluestone. The interior walls, left rough, are painted white as a backdrop to the primary colours of his sculptures. One could be in Spain or Morocco.
Cole loves the harsh, rock-strewn landscape with its great canopy of sky, fiercely. It is a constant reminder for him of the most fundamental division of landscape into ground-plane and sky, heavens and earth and the interconnectedness of all things. He was drawn to it instinctively because it felt like the landscape of his childhood, that locus of first memories, in the country town of Gawler in South Australia. Many of the elements of that terrain now form the basis of the artist’s visual language.
It s also a language forged from an essentially modernist vocabulary first hammered out by artists such as Miro and Calder, and Cole’s own student observation during the 1960s of the minimalist aesthetic by Americans such as Sol LeWitt. One can also detect references to the ‘style moderne’ of popular furniture and domestic objects in the 1950s, the period of Cole’s childhood, and to Giotto’s treatment of the landscape in the thirteenth century.
Cole has been described as a ‘landscape sculptor’ – not in the usual sense of the way an artist might look at how this particular tree is juxtaposed with that particular outcrop of rock to create some specific field of visual interest, but rather in the way he distils the separate elements of his native landscape into a series of readily understood archetypes – moon, sun, starry sky, tree, rock-studded hillside and so on. While his use of colour Is deliberately seductive (we are drawn to it like bees to flowers or like children to brightly coloured toys), it is also archetypal: fierce red for fire, intense blue for sky and yellow for sun. The earth elements are symbolised by his use of patinated metals and the linking linear rods serve to bind the individual elements and to guide the viewer towards finding and making connections.