Twiss, with a twist

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

When sculptor Greer Twiss' two-floor Theatre Workshop show opens at the New Gallery tomorrow evening, he plans to welcome guests with puppetry and a song. "I was thinking about that old Noel Coward song, There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner," says Twiss with a twinkle. "It seems about right for just now."

Puppetry and music are by no means a new pairing for 65-year-old Twiss, one of the country's most distinctive sculptors, with a distinguished teaching career at Elam Art School, and more than 40 years of gallery exhibiting. He is the creator of public sculptures in Auckland, the most familiar being The Karangahape Rd Fountain on the corner of K Rd and Symonds St, and he was the recipient last year of an Officer of New Zealand Merit Award.

For Twiss, who retired from Elam a few years ago, a witty tune and a puppet show go way back - the Herald's trusty photo archives yield an image of a cheeky-looking Greer at the age of 17, manipulating one "Charlie Junks" to the gramophone tune of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania; the caption notes that Twiss had more than 60 puppets at the time.

Just one of those puppets will make an appearance in Theatre Workshop; sadly, it's the charred sole survivor of a devastating house fire in 1985 which destroyed the life of his teenage son's friend, a priceless amount of New Zealand art, and most of Twiss's huge collection of "junk" - his word.

Theatre Workshop, he notes, though the first major survey of his work in a public gallery, is "more a collecting of the work and talking about it. We don't say 'retrospective', it has a touch of death about it". This is said, mind you, with a grin.

Since the fire, Twiss has steadily restocked, as Theatre Workshop shows. He is addicted to rummaging around secondhand shops and markets, a habit his wife Dee, a psychologist, won't always tolerate. "I love junk shops, but even when we travel overseas my wife has to keep saying to me, 'Put that back on the footpath'," says Twiss wistfully.

But junk is the artist's lifeblood; not only a source of amusement and nostalgia, it is also a perceptive trigger much in evidence in the "workshop" part of the exhibition, a recreation of his Ponsonby studio, with a twist.

"There is quite a precedent for recreating artists' studios in a gallery," Twiss explains, "and we thought it would be quite fun to do that. Initially the idea was to pick up the studio and bring it in here, but that would have meant I didn't have a studio for four months and anyway, I didn't think it would be of much interest."

The solution was to partially fake it, reproduce elements and objects in lead and galvanised sheet metal. "A lot of my work is to do with the shift between perceived reality and reality so I thought, let's play on that. We've set up a studio space with a staged collection of the ephemera I collect around me, plus a recreation of the workbench. The bench is like a work - it's made of the same material I've worked in, which is 'galv'. Some of the tools are real, some are fake - it's coming in and out of reality which I find fun to do."

Twiss says there's also a sound reason for placing - "staging" - real items among reproductions of them. "Our reason for doing it is to say, here is the context out of which the works you see in the gallery have come, so lots of things you see on the shelves are the source material. These things don't just come out of the air, they come from the things around you."

Birds feature in much of Twiss' work, most notably albatrosses and ducks. Because he's a collector, the ducks - naturally - came from "a nice little straw duck decoy I had sitting on the shelf".

"I thought, I'll make that out of lead, and that was quite nice, and I ended making about 30 of them. The next process was wondering what decoys were about. What are decoys? Do ducks fly overhead and look down and think, hey, there's some of our kind down there, we'll go and visit them?"

Twiss has used native birds in some work, but as always, there is a warp. "With native birds, I thought, let's make some decoys of the birds they don't shoot, like kiwi and takahe. I started looking for recordings of sounds to go with them and I came across some readings from Cook's journal which were about how they had beautiful feathers, made lovely noises - and go well in a pie. So I made this work called Edible History, the birds listening to Cook's words."

Similarly, Twiss's albatrosses are never in flight. "They are strapped to beams and supports, to help them fly. I call them trainers for albatrosses, like those old people with walking frames."

And then there is his tableau of books, guns, cabinetry and dead birds: in other words, a comment on museums in less enlightened times.

Elam head Professor Michael Dunn notes in his book New Zealand Sculpture: A History that Twiss has always been a risk-taker, "too idiosyncratic and lacking in political correctness to be a useful role model for students ... he encouraged individuality".

Twiss can live with that. "I sort of flirt with politics and conservation but my work is not politically driven. I always liked that Bernard Shaw attitude that there are no good manners or bad manners, there are only sane manners. I say what I want to say but it gets you into a lot of trouble."

With amusement, Twiss points out that not only is he married to a psychologist, his two sons are both married to psychiatrists. "I get frightened when I sit down with them all because there's enough of a quorum to put me away."

When and Where

* Greer Twiss, Theatre Workshop, New Gallery

* From Saturday June 2