Michael Hill on King’s work
Michael Hill 2014
Head of Art history and Theory national Art School
When Stephen began study in the late 1970s at Sydney College of the Arts, the major pathway offered to students was
that of Conceptualism, newly arrived from New York. This movement emphasized the idea of art at the expense of craft, since
the tradition of hand-made objects had supposedly run its course. To Stephen such an approach seemed arid at best. He studied printmaking, a medium long-associated with narrative and one that demanded exacting technique, and wondered at the time if the disappearance of art was as necessary
as pundits claimed. What about the joy of creating something out of nothing? What about storytelling? Elsewhere other artists had been similarly vexed and had lit off on a different way, exploring the life of suburbia and other real-life subjects within voices derived from naïve, outsider, and street
art. Comics, with their sequential pictures and distinctive patois within text bubbles, gained a new urgency – not ironically, as in Pop, but as a legitimate mode of interpreting the world, one that valued the concrete
over the abstract and quick-wit more than deep theory. Without knowing it, Stephen was part of a wider movement at the time, which included local artists such as Reg
Mombassa and international groups like the Chicago Imagists and New Glasgow Boys.
The following decade, Stephen moved
to London with fellow printmaker Julia Griffin, future wife and mother of their three daughters. Living in a bedsit and studying at St Martin’s College, Stephen did a series of etchings of Old Ted, a stockman from
his family farm. The prints are graphically daring. While Stephen thought of himself as a fabulist, his underlying sense of structure was strikingly intense.
When Stephen returned home to Walcha
in 1981, soon taking on the responsibility of running a 2800-acre farm, he continued to make art, especially painting and linocut. The later is part drawing and part relief carving; this and a burgeoning desire to preserve the three dimensions of nature led him by the end of the decade to sculpture. Specifically, chainsaw sculpture. His statues were of the human figure, defined by the cylindrical volume of the tree trunks from which they were carved. Width was severely predetermined, but height was not, and this meant that his sculptures tended to approach the condition of being columns. Unless they were made thin, figures could
not stand side by side; instead, the normal arrangement when dealing with multiple individuals or objects was to pile them one atop the other. It used to be said about classical marble sculpture that it could be rolled down a hill, so pervasive was the structural need to avoid tensile cantilevers, not to mention the aesthetic dictum of ex uno lapide (made from one stone). Likewise the bulk of Stephen’s output throughout the 1990s; statues, including the base, were hewn resolutely from single pieces of wood, which kept them rigid, allowed them to stand upright, and dramatized the moment when the curved tree trunk becomes the figured artistry of the hand.
The materiality is also evident in the rough carving and decidedly unpolished finish of the surface. Stephen’s sculpture has the chiseled and angular quality of Expressionist woodcuts, harking back to his printmaking days. Yet works such Bert (2010) or Self- Portrait (2011) – particularly the fingernails on the rear – show that he could also coax an image from the structure of the wood
so convincingly that form and content are fused. Mostly the nature of the timber – above all, stringybark – remains bare. Unlike medieval sculpture, the core is not hollowed out, so that the wood splits vertically from outside in as it continues to season.
I was with him once when he went to inspect one of his works installed in a Port Macquarie rainforest. The manager was alarmed that it seemed to have splintered down the middle. Stephen shrugged and said something along the lines, “It’s a natural process. I can put some wax into the crack if you want it to close.” The opening and closing of the wood was like breathing – relax, nothing to worry about. He knew what caused it and how to stop it, but in his eyes sculpture changes. He uses already fallen trees on his property; he calls the myriad of holes that pit the surface, “wood grub dreaming”; he waters his land with water super-oxygenated by a handmade contraption that looks like one his sculptures. Nature and art for Stephen are linked expressions, different aspects of a continuum.
Pink Flowering Ironbark 2010 stringybark and basalt
250 x 250 x 300cm
Connected to his relationship with materials are thematic concerns. One is our partial knowledge of things, which causes us half- blind to stumble around uncomprehending of what it is we’re doing. Some figures labor under the weight of their composition; many look downward, or examine phenomena
in amazement, either because they are seeing as if for the first time, or are looking at the world with such tunnelled vision that everything seems startling. Another feature, a corollary of the first, is empathy with animals. Stephen does not exalt people so much as make fun of them. The idea that we are fundamentally distinct from, not to say better than, other creatures is for him absurd.
I said that the bulk of Stephen’s sculpture is upright, figurative, and made of single tree trunks. The Eight (2009) is one exception, where the standing rowers are united by
the flat line of the boat, cutting almost aggressively across the composition. Bert is another exception, assembled from at least four pieces of wood and braced with dowels. And, being a horse, the composition is a type of structure, dominated by the horizontal torso, a formal element exaggerated by showing him with outstretched neck.
A similar arrangement was achieved in
Upstream II (2010), where the double relief of freestyle swimmers gliding along a torqued beam was presented, in structural terms, as a post and lintel arch.
This constructional approach appears to
be growing in significance. When divested of figures, Stephen discovered that he no longer had to scale his work primarily in terms of the human body. This in turn has opened up the prospect of going large. The original marquette for Fallout, which won the Sculpture by the Sea Grand Prize in 2013, showed a trio of men desperately trying
to hold up a structure that is collapsing above them; in the finished work, the men disappeared, and instead the precariousness of the situation is conveyed less literally but in my view with greater force by the rotation of the bladed trunks. The outer surface of the human comedy has given way to inner drama of movement and gesture. One work done in the last year, Folly, has no figure left at all. Half-modern and half-medieval, it is
a massive semi-architectural construction, without floors, walls, or roofs; in other words, a structural frame, but instead of the gridded rationalism of a building in the age of steel, it is assembled from unstraightened logs of unequal length, held together with mortise and tenon joints.
Stephen is one of a group of artists
who have made Walcha a hub of what bureaucrats call “nationally significant artistic practice”. Through Walcha’s Open Air Gallery, which Stephen established in 1996, he has also helped the town develop the most vibrant program of public art to be seen anywhere in Australia. This is some achievement for a place of 1700 people - there are cities one hundred fold this size that don’t have half of what Walcha has. Art can only thrive in a community, because art is essentially a form of communication. Yet the community cannot exist simply by virtue of numbers. It needs the charisma and commitment of individuals like Stephen, someone to get things going and keep them going.
All this is the sort of praise heard at funerals. Yet works such as Fallout and Folly indicate unmapped directions in Stephen’s sculpture. If this is the case then an exhibition of
his work should not be understood as a retrospective, but rather as a survey of an artist mid-career, on the verge of the next stage.