The many faces of Terry Stringer - Robin Gibson...

medallic, trophy and small sculpture worlds can straddle the sublime and the ridic-ulous. Perhaps it takes New Zealand to bring this into relief. Consider the image of former All Black, Paul ‘Ginge’ Harrison, triumphantly wielding the National Provincial Second Division Championship trophy – created by the subject of this article Terry Stringer – which artfully conceals the flanker’s beefy naked-ness, socks apart (fig. 1). Juxtapose this with the University of Auckland critical theorist Laurence Simmons’s disquisition on how, in Stringer’s oeuvre, ‘genre reflects and codifies the artist’s intention as well as enabling the spectator to decode the coded system of signs produced.’1 Stringer’s work is potentially open to laddish and learned readings alike; its appeal straddles the popular and the academic; it is accessible yet potentially complex; formal yet spiritual; plenti-ful in quantity, and yet each piece has a compel-ling reason for being. Its consistently beautiful facture makes this author bemoan how in contemporary New Zealand (and probably every-where else) ‘the same kudos no longer exists’ in the fashionable art world for ‘traditional crafts-man skills’ such as Stringer’s.2 Over twenty years ago, I identified Stringer as one of several artists who deserved to ‘provide the focus for a future article’ in The Medal.3 With the critical mass of work that he has produced in the interim period, that moment has surely arrived.

Terry Stringer (b. 1946) is primarily known as one of New Zealand’s foremost figurative sculptors. While he would not consider himself a medallist per se, he regards that branch of practice as ‘a good way of exploring space and form, both for their own sake and for playing with ideas for bigger works’. Medals or rather, given his preference for non-geometrical solids, medallions consciously ‘form part of a continu-um with small sculptures’.4 Quantitatively, most of his considerable output consists of maquettes, usually measuring up to thirty centimetres in their largest dimension. For many years these have been produced at the rate of one every three days, and a proportion are enlarged, repli-

cated, exhibited or otherwise developed further. Unlike his younger contemporary Marian

Fountain (b. 1960), who also studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, Stringer did not originally train as a medallist. His opinions on Paul Beadle (1917-92), the doyen of that intimate medium in New Zealand, are disarmingly frank. When asked how central a role Beadle had played in encouraging him in this direction at Elam, Stringer tersely replied: ‘None at all’. Indeed, Stringer claims he received ‘very poor technical advice at art school’ and that Beadle ‘was not a generous teacher’. This was symptomatic of how ‘the academic training that had been so celebrated in the nineteenth century’ (and which Stringer would surely have valued) had effectively ‘petered out’ by the mid 1960s.5 At the same time, he warmly admires Beadle’s ‘exquisite’ 1-cent rock wren and 20-cent white heron decimal coinage reverse designs, while the bronze Chess Piece (1964) occupies an honourable place in the enclosed garden at Zealandia, Stringer’s residence and sculpture park at Mahurangi, some fifty kilometres north of Auckland.6

Stringer already enjoyed an established track record as a sculptor, with exhibitions at – as well as acquisitions by – leading collections such as the Auckland City Art Gallery and the National Art Gallery, Wellington, prior to his first work that can be readily classifiable as a medallion (1988). That is, if we are permitted to stretch the term to comprehend a stretched cube! The Designers Institute of New Zealand award (fig. 2) highlights the transformative powers of the hand of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in what was even then a relentlessly growing digital culture. Its other sides comprise nikau palm fronds, denoting the award’s nationality, and fabric in a repeating fan pattern.7 The fact that the object soon came to be known as ‘The Stringer’ testifies to its elegance and its perceived appropriateness for its intended function.

In 1989 Stringer was a founder member of the New Zealand Contemporary Medallion Group (renamed Medal Art New Zealand in

The many faces of Terry Stringer

Mark Stocker

THE MEDAL No. 63, 201326

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2004), and in the following year represented his country at its collective FIDEM debut in Helsinki.8 In the intervening near quarter-century, Stringer’s medallions have regularly appeared, albeit in small numbers, at the FIDEM biennales of 1994, 1996 and 2007, as well as in such exhibitions as MM: millennium medallions (discussed below), Pacific Rim (Simmons Gallery, London, 2001) and Medal Art New Zealand’s twentieth anniversary show (Remuera Gallery, Auckland, 2009). The group – and Stringer himself – have played a continuing role in the Auckland region’s burgeoning sculpture exhi-bition scene, with its designated tent pavilion at Sculpture on the Gulf on Waiheke Island (2013). Stringer credits Marian Fountain and Betty Beadle, Paul’s wife, for having noted the absence of an organisational structure to foster medal and medallion making in New Zealand.

Their activities to remedy the situation kindled his and other artists’ interests in these media, enabling them to realise that they too could be medallists. In subsequent years Wallace Suther-land, Robert Ellis, Jim Wheeler and Richard Mathieson have all been major players, as Stringer freely acknowledges.

Among these artists, diverse personal styles are encouraged to flourish, and Stringer is no exception. As his earlier point makes clear, there is an essential continuum between his medallions and his sculptures. Size as much as anything dictates where and when one shades into the other. How can we best characterise Stringer’s work? From the outset, it has had a firmly figurative priority. While he is certainly capable of respecting abstraction in the work of other artists, Stringer briskly rejects it for his own medallions and sculpture:

2. Stringer: Designers

Institute of New Zealand

award, 1988, bronze, 280 x

176 x 152mm.

1. ‘Winning Grin’ – Paul

Harrison and Stringer’s Air

New Zealand trophy. From

the Sunday Star Times, 27

October 1996.

THE MEDAL No. 63, 2013 27

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I think of the recognisable image as a language of communication. An abstract to me doesn’t have a meaning because it’s totally within the arbitrary whim of the creator. You don’t know whether the abstract is complete, whether the artist could add something to it or take something away.

By contrast, he regards ‘making figure art as an intrinsic part of being human … I’d like to think that the important element is that the figure is the language of communicating art.’ Without necessarily pandering to populism, Stringer explains that, ‘I want people to be able to see what I’ve done when I make a work, for someone with no experience of my work … to recognise what has happened.’9

Stringer’s art was arguably at its most enig-matic, difficult and intellectually fashionable in his cubistic still life constructions of the mid-1980s, where three-dimensional objects are

faceted and squeezed into shallower ‘two and a bit’ dimensional spaces.10 Today he regards such works as an experimental interlude, however important, between (re)visiting the figure. Faceting was subsequently replaced by signature fragmenting, cropping and slicing. Art historian Michael Dunn believes that the ‘incompleteness of Stringer’s bronze figures reduces the more trivial aspects of representation … By placing the focus on form and feeling in response to what is there and what is implied, Stringer allows scope for interpretation.’11 The more recent sculptures, large and small, provide a contrast of differ-ent images on each face, though by definition they share a common outline. In the course of investigating the work, the viewer is rewarded by surprises; the concealed is sometimes quite abruptly revealed. By changing the image from one face to the next, Stringer recognises that ‘one is doing the same thing as what a medal has to

3. Stringer: Remember

Me, oil on pewter, 1992,

110mm.


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have’.12 We are taken on a mental, physical and, in larger works, temporal journey.

It would be tempting to attribute this effect and affect to Surrealism; the impact of René Magritte seems apparent in the early pewter medallion Remember Me (fig. 3). Stringer, however, rejects this line of thought, insisting that it all ‘grew out of the Victorian parlour game tradition, where the shared outline is a trick for the eye’.13 Pop-up books, puzzles, toys, whirligigs, puppets and peepshows, even hinged altarpieces as they are opened and closed, all provided ways of seeing. Formal qualities emphasising the presentation and communica-tion of the figure are more important to Stringer than any story that the figure may enact or embody. Any interpretation of the latter is up to the viewer’s own imagination. Thus while there may be a ‘retro’ aspect to Stringer in his sources

of inspiration, akin to the nostalgia of Peter Blake’s Pop Art, there is a consistently modern-ist rejection of illustration as well as an insist-ence on seriality and subtle permutation within his work. Stringer states: ‘If I’ve got a balance of ideas happening that is fruitful, then I can explore it over and over again.’14

An essential consistency underlies Stringer’s body of medallic works, with relatively little obvious stylistic change being evident over three decades. As he believes that a cluster of medallions and small sculpture has a far greater impact and meaning than a single such work or even a pair of them, he has created a mini-installation out of a selection of his 1990s pieces, which are sometimes arranged as such at Zealandia. Together, the objects loosely allude to time, senses and sentiments (fig. 4).

A small bronze die, Time Sets All Things


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Right, its title a quotation from G. F. Handel’s oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth, is the key element in the group. On one face of the die, a hand and wrist wearing a watch are set against the Southern Cross, conveying time and location. Another small bronze, showing a hand clasping a sprig, touches the viewer emotionally with its inscription that reads ‘Yours truly’ or ‘Truly yours’. In its title the flat pewter cut-out Twelve Months Sped quotes from a romantic Victorian postcard – and the flower depicted is a pohutukawa or New Zealand Christmas Tree, which blossoms each December. In real life, the pohutukawa is vibrantly crimson in colour, but has no scent; the latter is thus supplied in Violets are Blue, Sugar Sweet are You, a small linear construction of the flower standing in a wine-glass. Both visually and thematically it evokes the deliberately corny but coolly rendered Still

Life: Mother’s Day of Patrick Caulfield (1975), where emotion is undercut by ironical wit.15

Another related work closer to home is Chris-tine Hellyar’s large drawing in space, Necklace Goblet (2001; Connells Bay Sculpture Park, Waiheke Island).16 Hellyar’s prominent place in New Zealand sculpture may lead some critics to accord her greater credit here, when Violets are Blue was actually the earlier work by some three years. Rather than an otiose question of who or what came first, Stringer prefers to see the consonance as mutually beneficial; he and Hellyar were working side by side at the time. The installation is completed by a work that probably bears the closest resemblance to Stringer’s signature sculpture, a little pewter mask entitled My Words Fly Out. It can be rested on its profile as well as placed upright. Stylisti-cally, it represents a reworking of the famous

4. Stringer: (clockwise

from front) Time Sets All

Things Right, 1990, bronze,

40 x 50 x 45mm.; Twelve

Months Sped, 1990, pewter,

70 130 x 12mm.; My Words

Fly Up, 1994, pewter, 100

x 95 x 45mm.; Yours Truly

/ truly Yours, 1991, bronze,

120 x 70 x 23mm.; Violets

are Blue / Sugar Sweet Are

You, 1993, bronze, 100 x 65

x 15mm.


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bronze Hypnos in the British Museum, which is commonly believed to be a first- or second-century AD Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic original. Yet the stylised, soulful eyes remind this viewer of the emotionally intense late 1940s portraits of the young Lucian Freud.

What then is the collective impact of this ensemble? Formally, the objects provide a good illustration of the diversity of Stringer’s approaches to flat, solid and linear shapes and masses. And then clearly we are invited to contemplate time, love and life; senses, senti-ments, emotions and clichés come into play along the way.

With this group in mind, Stringer has observed how ‘the subjects of medallions can be pleasing when they have a touch of feeling, even sentimentality. A small work in your hand, with the message of emotion, is part of the nature

of the communication. Therefore in my medal-lions there are an awful lot of, shall we say, traditional greetings.’17 The extent of obvious cross-fertilisation between Stringer’s medallions and his large-scale sculpture is limited, partly because of the intimacy of the former and the monumentality of the latter. An outsized medal risks looking overblown, even crass, as he is well aware. Occasionally, however, the two art forms have interrelated when Stringer has seen the bigger potential of a medallion.

A prime example is Work Life / Life Work, which was translated four years later into a 125-centimetre bronze sculpture Time For Life / Life For Time (fig. 6) and erected in the garden at Zealandia. The subject has an element of autobi-ography as it incorporates the artist, the model and the idea of the life drawing, alluding to a lifetime of life work. The artist and the model

5. Stringer: Work Life /

Life Work, 1998, bronze,

150mm.

6. Stringer: Time for Life /

Life for Time, 2002, bronze,

125 x 95 x 20cm.


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have their heads fused together, as if conspir-ing. The negative space between them forms a hand, made more explicit on the reverse, which in solid form features reliefs of a pencil and a modeling tool. The medallion’s transformation into the sculpture retains the same essential imagery, but it has also enabled Stringer to add the face of a child to the profile as well as to make modifications to the wording. The greater scale endows the hand with a new quirkiness that is somewhat reminiscent of Keith Haring, while Stringer himself likes to link the motif to the Native American greeting ‘How!’ Qualities such as these often temper what might other-wise seem like an overbearing seriousness and almost obsessively clever image and wordplay that pervade Stringer’s work.

Stringer’s wariness of the conventional medal format probably explains why he enjoys

experimenting with pierced circular forms. The former Montana book awards, sponsored by the winemakers, was for many years (1994-2009) the most coveted set of literary prizes in New Zealand. Stringer was commissioned to design the winners’ medals in 1998 (fig. 7). The obverse inscription ‘Words fly’ probably suggests to erudite viewers and readers the Latin phrase ‘verba volant, scripta manent’ (‘words fly away, writings remain’). The piercing cleverly and vividly conveys a flying seabird, while on a more banal level it also denotes the space between the reader and the book. On the reverse, the same bird, when rotated 180 degrees, carries a sprig of laurel in its beak.

A similarly canny use of negative space is explored in two further medallions, Elevation (fig. 8) and Thoughts Fly (fig. 9). ‘Is it a bird, is it a plane?,’ Stringer encourages us to ask. The

7. Stringer: Montana Book

Awards, 1998, bronze,

135mm. ht.


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answer is the former, a native tui. Although thirteen years separate the two works, the continuities are evident and the concept behind Elevation had clearly appealed sufficiently to Stringer to revisit it. Elevation depicts the patron of the medal, Auckland property developer Andrew Krukziener, who commissioned an edition of two hundred to celebrate the erection of the forty-storey Metropolis Building in the Auckland Central Business District, a five-star hotel and residential complex and the largest such construction project undertaken by a private developer in New Zealand.18 The figure’s distorted hands, which form into the negative space of the tui, hold – and indeed elevate – the architectural elevation of the building, which the bespectacled Krukziener intently contem-plates. Surely an element of tongue-in-cheek influenced Stringer’s incision denoting the

building in a schematic, cartoon-like way and thus conveying the sense of sagging rather than proud elevation. One even senses an ideologi-cal disparity – Stringer’s political sympathies appear more Green than turbo-capitalist – although he remains grateful for Krukziener’s indisputably generous act of patronage. Arguably, Thoughts Fly is the stronger, simpler image. Here Krukziener has been replaced by a fixated child, whose eerily foreshortened form unmistakably evokes the surrealistic mood of Bill Brandt’s celebrated photograph London Child (1955), a source which Stringer willingly acknowledges. Another possible influence might well be Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse series of disembodied heads (1909-11), which become steadily more abstract in the course of their evolution.

Stringer was one of the artists invited to


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participate in MM: millennium medallions (2000), a rare but welcome instance of two major New Zealand museums (City Gallery, Wellington, and Auckland Museum) commis-sioning and hosting a travelling exhibition of this art form.19 The two different versions of Stringer’s millennium medallion both have a medal-like regularity, but this is again disrupt-ed by the use of negative space (figs 10, 11). In one, the obverse mother and swathed child are clearly denoted, and the space between them suggests a slightly distorted and thus not over sentimentalised heart. On the reverse, the same void is transformed into a sprouting plant, set against the rising sun. The enigmatic inscription ‘Start up’ invites various interpreta-tions: rebooting computer systems in the face of the then imminent Y2K crisis, a tabula rasa to be signalled by the new millennium, or even,

when reversed as ‘Up start’, an irreverent refer-ence to the baby.

The other millennium medal depicts a boy closely contemplating a medal of the face of Christ. On the reverse, the gap between them turns into the eternal flame, the light of the Resurrection. Although Stringer is deliber-ately reticent about discussing the spiritual content of his art (and still more so about addressing personal questions of faith), its presence is recurrent. The art historian Robin Woodward observes:

Christian subject matter has consistently provided a vehicle through which Stringer explores … three-dimensional form … Through-out his oeuvre Stringer constantly challenges the viewer’s understanding and knowledge of classical stories and Christian narratives as he

8.Stringer: Elevation, 1998,

bronze, 170mm.

9. Stringer: Thoughts Fly,

2011, bronze, 285 x 340 x

198mm.


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10. Stringer: Up Start /

Start Up, 2000, bronze,

145mm.

manipulates traditional representation of form in figurative bronze sculpture.20

A further new millennium commission, of large medallic size (195 millimetres in height) but clearly a trophy in both format and function, is the Arts Foundation Laureate Award (fig. 12). These awards are presented to five artists annually, spanning the visual and performing arts and literature, and the recipients constitute a veritable roll call of ‘high culture’ achievers. Conspicuously absent from the list of laure-ates, however, is Stringer himself. Perhaps after thirteen years any lingering sensibilities about conflict of interest should cease to apply and one such award should be painlessly bestowed upon its maker! Stringer writes of it: ‘my concept for the sculpture is of a child with raised hands clapping.’21 While the outside shape takes the

form of a bird’s egg, the interior negative outline – employed yet again to telling effect – assumes the shape of another flying tui, and is thus ‘a feather in the cap’ for the laureates. As with the closely related Thoughts Fly, Stringer uses a child to avoid representing either a man or a woman, while the egg symbolises the starting-point from which the artist has flown to achieve great heights.

In recent years, Stringer’s productivity in medallions has if anything increased. In 2007, one of his personal favourites, Adore Rend Lend Lead (2006) was exhibited at the 30th FIDEM congress at Colorado Springs (fig. 13).22 The intensity of the word game is redoubled; indeed, Stringer admits that here ‘the words might even dominate the image. I call it a medallion, it’s an oblong plane which is curved.’ Thus the word ‘lend’ on one plane and ‘adore’ on another can


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11. Stringer: 2000 Years

This Era, 1999, bronze,

110mm.


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be read in fragments, as can for example ‘lead’ or ‘rend’. While the last seems momentarily puzzling, ‘rend’ presumably denotes the action of splitting and division, which the multiple viewpoints and accompanying words encour-age. That said, the violence and rupture of ‘rending’ contrasts with the sensuous attractive-ness of the woman’s face, her hand combing back her hair. We are naturally invited to ‘adore’ her. Stringer says, ‘To me it suggests Kiri Te Kanawa’, while the clapping hands evident in another viewpoint are ‘part of the adoration’. When I commented to Stringer on the gentle-ness, refinement and sometimes even sweet-ness of his vision, putting the viewer, whether male or female, in touch with the feminine side of themselves (uncommon qualities in New Zealand art), his response was somewhat cool: ‘You’re entitled to say that, but it’s not some-

thing that’s consciously articulated.’23 Yet like the spirituality, it is evident to many viewers.24

Stringer claims that ‘there is a constant impulse with visual artists to put words in their work’, and this becomes ‘almost obligatory’ for medallions.25 At Elam, one of the teaching staff in Stringer’s time was Colin McCahon (1919-87), New Zealand’s most famous and admired painter of the third quarter of the twentieth century, who declared in his waywardly bril-liant, homespun, prophetic way: ‘I will need words … words can be terrible but a solution can be given. In spite of the message which can burn, I intend a painting in no way expressionis-tic but with a slowly emerging order.’26 Stringer never felt any particular need to be an acolyte of McCahon, although he freely acknowledges his significance and power. Despite McCahon’s loud protests, his art often tends towards the expres-

12. Stringer: Arts

Foundation Laureate

Award, 2000, bronze, 195 x

165 x 70mm.

13. Stringer: Adore Rend

Lend Lead, 2006, bronze,

145 x 100 x 62mm.


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sionistic, whereas Stringer from the outset has been far more classicist. Thus while a sense of ‘slowly emerging order’ is not always easy to appreciate in McCahon, in Stringer it defines his aesthetic. McCahon preaches, rambles and shouts in paint; Stringer, however, is less clam-orous, more subtle and perhaps even melodic, especially when he tells us to ‘Look’, ‘Love’, ‘Give’, ‘Gild’, ‘Told’, ‘Took’, the ‘lyrics’ of his Love Look (fig. 14). As with Adore Rend Lend Lead, this is a series of words with an image applied (and vice versa). ‘Look’ accompanies the profile of a face, ‘Give’ is applied to a hand with drapery, and ‘Told’ corresponds to an ear; when chal-lenged about ‘Gilt’, Stringer responded that there

was the merest hint of gilded bronze coming through, ‘if we want to have a pedantic conversa-tion about it.’27 Words are not always necessary; one of his most sensuous medallion-scale pieces is Gather Ye Rosebuds, where the beauty of the modelling and the theme seem perfectly fused (fig. 15). The Robert Herrick poem that inspired the title does not advocate a hedonistic ’24-hour party’ philosophy, so much as the longer term and deeper spiritual benefits of taking advantage of life’s opportunities. Stringer’s medallion is likewise attuned to the underlying seriousness and poignancy of this message.

A recent uniface medallion, The Dream (fig. 16), was inspired by Edward Elgar’s choral work

14. Stringer: Love Look,

2005, bronze, 145 x 90 x

75mm.

15. Stringer: Gather Ye

Rosebuds, 2001, bronze,

155 x 115 x 90mm.


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and depicts on one of its faces the aged and pious Gerontius – who had probably failed to gather rosebuds in earlier days. He is a world away from the image of the pure and perfect infant, who comes into view when we flip the medallion. With typical cleverness, Stringer makes the infant’s nose a convincing ear for Gerontius, while Gerontius’s beard doubles up as the infant’s hair. The innocent goodness of early childhood is suggested by his halo, whereas the devil’s horns of Gerontius allude perhaps to the demons he encounters before heavenly judgment. The inscription can be read as ‘New’ for the fresh infant and, when inverted, ‘Man’ for the mature Gerontius. When

I saw the medallion, I assumed that Stringer’s cunning wordplay extended to J.H. ‘Newman’, the theologian whose painting had inspired the fellow Catholic Elgar’s composition in the first instance. Stringer had never contemplated this, but did not disavow my further reading, indeed seeing it as a happy coalescence.

A further change in format is evident in Time Turns the Tables, which is not hard to envisage functioning as an artistic paperweight on a table or desk (fig. 17). Its circularity enables Stringer to run the title words around the base. These can, of course, be read in a variety of sequences as we take our ‘time’ to ‘turn’ the ‘table’. Inspec-tion yields alternating views of a crying infant,

16. Stringer: The Dream,

2011, bronze, 140mm. ht.


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an aged man with incisions on his nose and, improbably but convincingly, a voluptuous reclining nude. While Stringer’s style is more obviously ‘Matissean’, it bears an interesting if unintentional resemblance to the frolicking neo-Rococo bacchante figure who dominates Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Bacchanal (1879), a bronze cast of which is a major work in the Auckland Art Gallery permanent collection

In an article on Stringer published in Art New Zealand in 1984, Laurence Simmons heaped acclaim on his ‘consummate playing with the codes of the genres with which he experiments’, thereby making him ‘one of the most gifted, demanding and, at the same time,

distinctive of New Zealand sculptors.’28 In this author’s view, this remains as applicable today as it did nearly thirty years ago, and as valid for the medallic ‘sub-set’ of his oeuvre as it is for Stringer’s more widely publicised larger-scale sculpture. Someone else must agree, for as I write this, bidding on the Auckland-based online art auction Ocula Black has reached a respect-able 1,500 New Zealand dollars (£780) for the medallion-sized bronze Angel in the Apple Tree (fig. 18), and the sale still has twenty-two hours to go.29 Less essentialist than the exquisite Marian Fountain, less politicised than the coruscating Michael Reed,30 and less humorously iconoclastic than Paul Beadle, Stringer is no whit inferior to

17. Stringer: Time Turns the

Tables, 2011, bronze, 80 x

145 x 145mm.


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acknowledgmentsI am very grateful to Terry Stringer for patiently

answering numerous questions and providing me with

access to, and photographs of, his works.

them; indeed, he might be dubbed the ‘thinking man’s medallist’ of New Zealand. Balancing word and image in an unforced, uncontrived and unaf-fected way is no easy matter, and Stringer admits that ‘to find the right word without it being a weird one takes some doodling.’31 Yet what impresses is how convincingly the two seem to meld in his mind and hand, and how the sum total is consistently greater than the attractive enough component parts.

18. Stringer: Angel in the

Apple Tree, 1998, bronze,

150 x 170 x 55mm.


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NOTES1. Laurence Simmons,

‘Tables/tableaux: some recent work by Terry Stringer’, Art New Zealand, 32 (1984),

pp. 38-41, 60, at p. 60.2. Michael Dunn, New

Zealand sculpture: a history (Auckland, 2008), p. 182. See also Dunn’s discussion of Stringer, pp. 97-100.

3. Mark Stocker, ‘Reverse and obverse: New Zealand medallions’, The Medal, 21 (1992), pp. 95-9, at p. 99.

4. Terry Stringer, recorded interview with the author, 26 November 2012.

5. Stringer, recorded interview. For Beadle, see especially Mark Stocker, ‘Pommie-Aussi-Kiwi: Paul Beadle, medallist’, The Medal, 33 (1998), pp. 83-97.

6. Zealandia Sculpture Garden, http://www.zealandiasculpturegar-den.co.nz/ (accessed 20 December 2012). See also Robin Woodward, ‘The artist’s hand and eye: Terry Stringer’s personal museum’, Art New Zealand, lxxxix (1998-9), pp. 48-51, 87.

7. Michael Smythe, New Zealand by design: a history of New Zealand product design (Auckland, 2011), p. 288.

8. XXII FIDEM 1990 Helsinki, exh. cat. (Helsinki, 1990), p. 210, nos 1225-6.

9. Stringer, recorded interview.

10. See for example Simmons, ‘Tables/tableaux’, pp. 58-61; Priscilla Pitts, Contem-porary New Zealand sculpture: themes and issues (Auckland, 1998), pp. 114-15.

11. Dunn, New Zealand sculpture, p. 99.


13. Stringer, recorded inter-view. See also Simmons,

‘Tables/tableaux’, p. 59. 14. Stringer, recorded

interview.15. See Frances Spalding,

British art since 1900 (London and New York, 1986), pp. 200-202.

16. Connells Bay Sculpture Park, ‘The Artists’, http://www.connellsbay.co.nz/sculpture_park_artists_christine_hellyar.html (accessed 20 December 2012).


18. See especially Colin Taylor, ‘A dreary skyline without Krukziener’, New Zealand Herald, 5 June 2010, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/property/news/article.cfm?c_id=8&objectid=10649655](accessed 20 December 2012).

19. City Gallery, Wellington, ‘Exhibitions: Millen-nium medallions’, http://www.citygallery.org.nz/exhibition/Milleni-umMedallions, (accessed 20 December 2012).

20. Robin Woodward, ‘The form of Christian art: Biblical subject matter in the sculpture of Terry Stringer’, Journal of New Zealand Art History, xxxii (2011), pp. 94-111, at p. 110.

21. The Arts Foundation, ‘Laureate Awards’, http://www.thearts.co.nz/laureate_award.php (accessed 20 December 2012).

22. FIDEM XXX. 30th congress. International Federation of Medallic Art, exh. cat. (Colorado Springs, 2007), p. 207, nos NZ11-12.


24. Kevin Ireland, for example, writes of the ‘superb serenity’ in ‘Recent work by Terry Stringer’, Art New Zealand, 55 (1990), pp. 58-61, at p. 61.


26. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu,

‘Colin McCahon New Zealander, 1919-1987: Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is’, http://christchurchart-gallery.org.nz/media/uploads/2010_07/Colin_McCahon_tomorrow_will_be_the_same_but_69_142.pdf (accessed 20 December 2012).


28. Simmons, ‘Tables/tableaux’, p. 61.

29. Ocula Black: The Art Market Place, lot 77078, http://oculablack.com/art-auctions/77078/ (accessed 19 December 2012). Cartouche with masks of Comedy and Tragedy (2007) was also being offered (lot 76929) at the time of writing.

30. See John Freeman-Moir, ‘“Neither shall they learn war any more”: Michael Reed’s medals of protest’, The Medal, 47 (2005), pp. 60-73.



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