One Day Sculpture

A New Zealand-wide contemporary art commissioning series, will be launched in Wellington in March 2008 in conjunction with the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Initiated by UK-based curator and Director of Situations, Claire Doherty and Massey University’s Litmus Research Initiative, and realised in partnershipwith art institutions throughout New Zealand, One Day Sculpture is a cumulative series of place-responsive public artworks by national and international artists that will begin in June 2008.

The series will involve the creation of 20 new artworks across five New Zealand cities over one year. Each artwork will be sited in the public domain and will exist for no more than a 24-hour period (with each artwork being realised on a different day). The works will reflect a diversity of artistic approaches from sculpture and installation in situ for 24 hours, to performance across the city at moments throughout one day.

One Day Sculpture will be launched in Wellington on Friday 7 March 2008 with a series of events:

To give audiences a taste of what is to come, the One Day Sculpture launch will be accompanied by the public presentation of Roman Ondak's celebrated work Good Feelings in Good Times, loaned from the Tate Collection, London. Good Feelings in Good Times is a static queue of people – with seemingly no point of resolution or purpose – that can be read as a sculpture, performance or intervention. The work will take place across a number of unspecified Wellington locations on Friday 7 March as part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival Visual Arts programme.

Claire Doherty will also participate in a public panel discussion to be staged in the Pacfic Blue Festival Club, Frank Kitts Park on Saturday 8 March 2008, 10.30am-12.30pm. The panel will contextualise One Day Sculpture within a broader discussion of temporary public art.

An international forum considering One Day Sculpture will occur at Camden Arts Centre, London, on 16 January 2008. As one of London’s leading centres for contemporary art, Camden’s invitation to host a critical discussion relating to One Day Sculpture indicates the international significance of the project.

One Day Sculpture will be accompanied by an international symposium in Wellington (to be held in March 2009) and a retrospective book publication to be released in late 2009.