John Ward Knox's Ush will add nothing to the gallery. In fact, he will be taking some of the gallery away.
"Artworks and objects are usually placed on the gallery surfaces. They're an addition," Knox (26) said.
"With this work, you're looking at something that's been taken away from the space."
For Ush he has been cutting into the gallery walls with an angle grinder to carve out a relief work.
"I wanted to pull the structure of the gallery into the equation, so that one material blends with another. The drapery motif I'm doing here is being carved into the wall and then painted white to blend the sculpture with the wall. It plays with your sense of perception. There's an effect of heavy gravity and slow forces at work," he said.
"When they work, they really trick you into a feeling of gravity, or weight. It's an optical illusion, but it's very real - like any carving possesses, except you're framing the gallery, rather than framing an artwork."
The Elam School of Fine Arts graduate is known for using a range of methods and media to create deceptively simple artworks.
The wall carving would be activated by shifting natural light levels, he said.
Ush will open at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on October 9 and runs until February 20, next year.
