Greg Johns Sculptures: In the Adelaide Hills region of South Australia
Take a walk through the back streets of Eden Hills and you may come across a front yard with a difference where the stark beauty of nature competes with the man made. And if you look down the driveway passed more sculpture pieces you'll catch the spark of the oxy acetylene welder and the spark of Greg John's creative imagination. This is a workshop cum forge cum artist's studio.
The process begins with a design being drawn on sheet metal. From those lines on a canvas of steel the process moves into the sheer grind of one of Greg John's large sculptures a man who bends steel to his artistic will.
Greg Johns sees forms in metal both small and large and it’s his larger pieces which now dominate the courtyards and entrance ways to public buildings and private galleries around Australia.
(Some examples can be found outside the Convention Centre, Marion Culture Centre and Aptos Cruz Gallery in Stirling.)
“When I started working on these pieces in the late seventies I was very interested in the notion of using simple forms but to create complex forms that change visually a lot as you move around them. And even going right back to the times of Michaelangelo as you move around a sculpture it changes. The balance and the whole feeling of balance changes and all the visuals change. So I'm still very much interested in that notion in my work.”
“And this was a model for a much larger piece?”
“Yes, this piece was done for World Expo in 1988. They called be and said can you make a five metre piece in three weeks?”
It was in 1988 that Greg's career as a sculptor took off literally. The piece called The Dance Continues was choppered (by helicopter) into Green Point near Gosford in New South Wales. It was a show stopping entrance to the big time for a bloke who'd laboured long and hard for years in a backyard shed in Adelaide and soon offers from New York came flooding in.
“I decided to stay here and not to move to New York and stay in Australia. One of the major reasons for that is that I think this is an amazing place to work and is quite untapped sculpturally. So I wanted to come up with a work that clearly came out of Australia which hopefully is quite original that doesn't look like it came from anywhere else.”
While some sculptural themes in the US and Europe may have been mined out, Greg digs deep for local iron stone used in his boat pieces which capture the immigrant experience in which so many have crashed onto the Australian coast in vessels large and small.
And ironstone again in a sculpture which recreates the harshness of the Aussie landscape where trees take hold in the most rugged terrain just as on his 400 acre property at Palmer near Mannum. It's not hard to see why a sculptor would fall in love with a place like this. But alongside these pieces from nature Greg plans to plant a few of his own.
“This is the first piece that I've placed at Palmer. That'll eventually become a sculpture and environmental park. A figurative piece influenced by both European sculpture and I think aspects of Aboriginal culture.”
It stands as a protective totem on a wind swept and rocky landscape, long denuded of the native grasses and sheoaks which once thrived here. But nearby Greg's revegetation project takes hold.
For a bloke who's choppered in pieces to various parts of Australia, the environmental regeneration of the Palmer hills is by far his biggest project, where man made sculptures will take second place to what has always been here.
“As you walk around there are some unbelievable standing stones that are incredibly beautiful and I don't think I would even try to compete with them sculpturally. They are magnificent.”
Greg Johns does commission work. You can contact him on 61 (0)8 8278 3273. His works are in foyers and walkways around Adelaide. If you have any further questions please email info@postcards.sa.com.au
