Robyn Notman, of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, takes a look at the work of the late Don Driver, one of New Zealand's most highly regarded artists.
Don Driver's Yellow Tentacle Pram is an iconic work from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's collection and one of the most significant assemblage sculptures the artist produced.
Born in Hastings and based in New Plymouth from 1944, Driver, who died in 2011, was one of this country's most highly regarded artists, known for his use of found materials choreographed to juxtapose colour, texture, pattern and form.
His sculptures are both visually appealing and menacing, combining objects as diverse as as animal skins, dolls, metal drums, canvas, coffee sacks, ladders, animal skulls, sheet iron and hooks.
Sometimes linked to ''Taranaki Gothic'', Driver's work is informed by and connected to international modernism and his assemblage art is a sophisticated form of vernacular surrealism, nourished by an innate aesthetic intelligence and real feeling for materials.
An avid hunter-gatherer, Driver was well known in Taranaki, and by his friends, for his persistent quest to source both bizarre and banal things and his eye for an object.
The big-wheeled canvas pram used in this work was sourced from the garage of his friends the Kreisler family, while the crenellated plastic drainpipes are long scraps of off-the-shelf industrial material.
The combination of old-pram brown with '80s plastic yellow is subtle and classic, but the overall work is a wonderful explosion.
The jabberwocky of all prams, this pimped-up tumbril - which wouldn't have been out of place in ''Wacky Races'' - is on display in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's Richard Walls Gallery.
• Cool and Collected runs fortnightly, sharing stories from the collections of Otago Museum, Toitu Otago Settlers Museum, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Olveston.
