Frank Film: The life and art of Sam Mahon and Alison Erickson

Under the branches of an old pittosporum on the grounds of a historic flour mill in Waikari, North Canterbury, a solitary figure sits on a chair. Rugged up in coat and cap, left ankle crossed over the other, he holds a cup of coffee, now speckled with twigs; the book in his other hand opens on to a poem: “Don’t just sit there you complicit / bastard; get up and do something!”

“This is the one that gives me the shits every time I walk past,” says sculptor, writer and activist Sam Mahon. “Who the f*** is this?”

Of course, it is him, Mahon himself, a sculptural representation of the artist by the artist at the artist’s home; a call to arms for environmental or political action that for Mahon is what art is all about.

“I think all art should be political. Every good sculpture should have context, form and story.”

Can’t some be there just for the beauty of the work?

“That’s called wallpaper. Art has a voice and the minute that voice is taken away from us by some corporate who says we should only have decoration and no story, we are in trouble.”

It is 40 years since Mahon bought the mill, then a cheap but derelict place on a 2.8-hectare patch of mainly bare land.

It is 40 years since Sam Mahon bought the mill. Photo / Eleanor Adams, Frank Film

Now it is the home, studio, garden, foundry and horse paddock for Mahon, his partner, artist Alison Erickson, and their 15-year-old daughter Charlie.

When Frank Film visits on a bitter June morning, Erickson, in gloves and a duffel coat, is heading outside to start up the furnace to melt the bronze in an age-old process of lost wax casting.

At school, she says, Erickson was the sort of kid “who was always in the art room at lunchtime”. While living down the road, she became a frequent visitor to the studio. “Sam would hand me a block of limestone or he taught me how to make stained glass,” she recalls. “I just thought it was wonderful, kind of magical.”

Then, at the age of 18, “I never left.”

Since then, Erickson has built a figurative sculptural practice recognised for its contemplative evocations of environmental change and human intimacy. In Canterbury, these include Looking for something that will last (2019) in Diamond Harbour, The winds of change (2015) outside the Rangiora Library and A room of one’s own (2022) at Tai Tapu Sculpture Garden.

“I enjoy the technical sides of casting bronze as well as the actual sculpting and the ideas that initially go into it,” Alison Erickson says. Photo / Eleanor Adams, Frank Film

“I enjoy the technical sides of casting bronze as well as the actual sculpting and the ideas that initially go into it,” she says. “It’s fun to push the edges a little bit and see how tiny you can get things.”

Where Erickson focuses on sculpture, Mahon’s career has straddled painting, sculpture and writing, including The Year of the Horse, winner of the Best First Book Award in 2003, the much acclaimed The Water Thieves in 2006 and, in 2008, My Father’s Shadow: A Portrait of Justice Peter Mahon, an insight into the man best known as the Royal Commissioner into the Mount Erebus disaster.

His art spans the spidery subtlety of Regret in Christchurch’s Botanic Gardens (1997) to the more than twice-life-size rendition of former environment minister Nick Smith squatting, trouser-less, over a glass of water – a highly public protest against the impact of intensive dairying on Canterbury’s rivers and aquifers.

It was blunt, divisive, indicative of a self-styled voice of protest that drives his work.

In the studio, alongside a small figure of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, stands the head of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I don’t like him very much,” says Mahon, brushing a hand over his wrist, “so I carved his face then painted it with my own blood.”

Inside the lofty spaces of the workshop, he points to a small kinetic work combining the intrigue of a mid-century mechanical toy with political dissent. At a push of a button (or the insertion of a coin), small figures swing into Sisyphean action: a woman with a child on her back pushes a lever, a man works a grinding machine, another supports a plinth on which a rotund figure, a “one-percenter” says Mahon - referring to the wealthy elite who make almost twice as much as the bottom 99% of the world’s population - lounges back, large hand grasping the slender stem of a wine glass. The miniature movable bits, says Mahon, draw people in, “and then they get the idea – that [US comedian] George Carlin idea that if you want to cut somebody’s throat you put a razor blade in the muffin.”

He points to the moving carousel: “This is the muffin.”

It is uncompromising work built in an uncompromising climate. Canterbury’s winters are cold, the mill is old, the work itself hard.

“It’s spare, but it’s rich,” says Mahon. “Everything we’ve done here, all this, is built on art and art practice.”

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