Aaldert Verplanke likes to keep busy. The results of his sculptural endeavours are dotted throughout his Hastings garden.
"As long as I'm in the process of making something it doesn't matter what medium I use," he says.
The Flemish mechanical engineer emigrated to New Zealand 30 years ago. While he has been sculpting or carving since he was a child, like his siblings his artistic side was not something he explored until later in life.
Self-taught Verplanke prefers to let his ideas percolate for a while before choosing his materials. Along with Oamaru stone, he has also worked with driftwood, letting the initial shape dictate the final form.
He has christened one piece "P-brain" - it's full of holes.
"I had to name it that or I think people wouldn't get it."
He doesn't usually give suggestive names to his work, preferring to let people make up their own minds about what a piece is or represents.
With a bit of prodding from well-known artist Ricks Terstappen, Verplanke put some work into the first Wildflower sculpture exhibition in Hastings in 2008, and again last year with a glass wave.
It's a shape and a material he isn't yet ready to move on from. "[Glass is] an intriguing material, the different finishes, the colours."
A fan of sculpture on the scale of the work of renowned English artist Henry Moore, he thinks it a shame that there is nothing on Napier's waterfront that has that sort of wow factor.
Verplanke is not a fan of art without meaning, and also believes fair too much 2D work masquerades as sculpture. True sculpture is 3D, he says. "I think there's no point in art that's pointless, but even pretty pictures have a point to some people.
"If I've made something special and I can keep people's attention for 30 seconds, I'm happy."
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