Ben Pearce
Pearce completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Sculpture at Wanganui Quay School of Fine Arts in 2003. He won the Moly Morpeth sculpture award in 2014, the No. 8 Wire award in 2016 and the Colin Post Four Plinth commission in 2022. Recently he was selected as the first ARA recipient which supports artists for a year to focus on practice.
Ben’s works are monolithic, angular, minimalist and brutalist. Rather than feeling industrial, however, they feel like handwork, human, personal and individual. The emergent properties of their personality and softness become apparent on closer sustained viewing. Their monumentality is a kind of vanitas urging us to consider our own smallness and vulnerability as they loom gigantic overhead.
Pearce's corten stacked rock works speaks to humankind's long standing relationship with rockforms and their arrangement for ritual and spiritual associations. The work created by Pearce especially for Boon stands 3 metres tall and emerges from the ground plane in a rusty colouring contrasting to the green grass. The red oxide planes of steel reflect light and capture shadow in an evocative mathematical arrangement. Standing beside the work it stands gigantic above us. At different angles the work shifts as new sightlines bring new readings of the feelings the work presents us with.
