Charlotte FISHER

Arc 2004
Granite and bronze
3120 x 2500 x 440 mm
Collection of the Edmiston Trust, Auckland Domain

Part of the project initiated by Outdoor Sculpture 2001 Incorporated for the Auckland Domain and funded by the Edmiston Trust with support of the New Zealand Lottery Grant Board Millennium Fund and the Auckland City Council.

"Charlotte Fisher's Arc marks a special place in a sylvan glade on Centennial Walk through its use of the monumental media of stone and bronze. Sculptors have to work with these materials quite differently, hard stone being carved away, while bronze is poured into a mould created by an additive process, usually the modelling of clay. Yet both are favoured for public sculptures because of their durability, stone often providing a solid stable base to support a more elaborate representational bronze. The same combination is found here, but the forms are unexpected. This is no customary figure standing firmly on an architectonic plinth. The dark granite base is a tall smooth cylinder, tapered on a curve, on which balances a wide organic bronze arc with seven vertical forms. The image is evocative, but it is not representational in a conventional way. Fisher recounts that the superstructure is related to an ancient European petroglyph whose meaning is uncertain, although it may have depicted upright figures in a boat. In this reading the image has intrigued the sculptor for many years and inspired arcs and boat forms in her work. Because the Domain was once close to the Waitemata foreshore, the form seemed particularly apt for this site. In this context, Arc is a metaphor of migration, of voyages that led to the founding and growth of Aotearoa New Zealand. The work's elevated, somewhat precarious composition invokes the heroism yet vulnerability of those historic travellers."

Text written by Elizabeth Rankin, Professor of Art History, Auckland University, is from a publication sponsored by the P.A. Edmiston Trust, Auckland City Council and Hobson Community Board. Photograph taken by Gill Hanly courtesy of Urbis magazine.

CHARLOTTE FISHER was born in Whangarei in 1959. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Sculpture from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1989 after earlier completing an Art History degree in 1981.

Fisher has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions since 1982.

She has undertaken several major public art commissions including for the Auckland City Council: Grey Lynn Park, Oranga Community Centre and Alison Park on Waiheke Island and undertaken a work for Auckland's Sky City Hotel Sculpture Court.

Her work is held in both public and private collections nationally, including Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, Christchurch Art Gallery, Whangarei Art Museum, Whangarei, The Treasury, Wellington and Victoria University, Wellington.