Sculptor Paul Dibble and wife Fran Dibble. Photo:
"New Zealand is just like one big campground, really," sculptor Paul Dibble once commented to me when we were recording Taking Shape, a RNZ documentary series on New Zealand sculptors in 2000.
Quick of wit, and down to earth yet urbane like his city of Palmerston North, Dibble combined the common populist and playful touch with the rarefied world of the modernist bronze. His charge was how to make work of permanence in such a natural environment of evolution and change as Aotearoa.
Dibble was a kind of Kiwiana classicist; big of heart and humour, whose large sculptures, surreally juggling icons of this land, became landmarks across the country. Dibble gave the Kiwi rural environment grandeur, remembering our flora and fauna alongside the icons of Europe. His work is clever, familiar yet eery and surreal, tapping into mysteries of the spirit in a fledgling Pākehā culture.
'Looking and Listening for the Sea', a sculpture by Paul Dibble at the Begonia House in Wellington's Botanic Gardens. Photo:
No other New Zealand artist has owned bronze as a media as Dibble has. He trained at Elam School of Fine Arts in the 1960s, beginning a long collaboration with one of his teachers, Colin McCahon, providing bronzes for commissions for works in churches with the architect James Hackshaw.
Famously, Dibble's bronzes had edge, unlike those of Europe. Full of form from the front, they were all sharp silhouette from the side. This was Dibble's comment on our camping nature: our colonial buildings often facades with corrugated iron behind, our love of signs and sense that things are always in a state of change rather than permanence.
Dibble made sculpture to stand tall like trees, because he remembered the stumps of the great kahikatea forests of the Hauraki Plains of his youth, where he was raised on a farm. His was always the farmer's lament for what had been lost. It seemed fitting that he was commissioned to create an elegant and - surprisingly - restrained war memorial for New Zealand soldiers in Hyde Park, London in 2005.
Paul Dibble's 'The gold of the kowhai'. Photo: Graham Brown
His foundry was legendary in his later years, providing employment for many with the support of his talented artist, life partner and wife Fran Dibble. He was one of very few able to do large scale casting.
Dibble's ability to mix city and country set him apart. He was a long-time client of big dealer galleries like Gow Langsford in Auckland, with whom he held more than 20 exhibitions. His work can be found in public collections across Aotearoa, including Te Papa, The Christchurch Art Gallery, The Dowse and Massey University.
Continuum, an exhibition of Dibble's works from private collections, is currently on show at Palmerston North's Te Manawa museum until March 2024.