New Zealand Jade Sculpture
Ian Boustridge is one of a only a few master jade sculptors in New Zealand. Based in Greymouth on the wild west coast of the South Island, Boustridge loves the jade, also known as greenstone, or in Maori, as pounamu, for its multiplicity of character over a wide range of spectrums. They include colour, translucency, sound, feel, hardness, and toughness. Each of these qualities engenders a large number of end uses.
Boustridge (56) was one of the earliest full-time jade sculptors in New Zealand. Others were making jewellery (Peter Hughson, Bill Mathieson Snr. Cliff Dalziel, Theo Schoon) but Boustridge wanted to do something different. He produced a small stylised vase which impressed Schoon in a Christchurch gallery, unaware it had been made by a 19 year old student he had inspired five years earlier. A 12" high carved trout came next, and soon others began sculpting the green stone.
Jade as Sonic Art
Boustridge began producing spirals in his jewellery which evolved in his sculptural work later as tendrils. One tendril was created specifically as sonic art - created for its sound. The hard dense stone rings with an exceptionally pure tone and a 13 minute sonic art composition inspired by the sculpture was created for it by Dr Chris Cree-Brown, Associate Professor and Dr of Music at Canterbury University.
Jade Carving Influences
A student of Yvonne Rust, QSM, as a 13 yr old, Boustridge was much affected by her philosophies of art/craft and nature.
"She opened my eyes to going into the bush to find the raw materials to create artworks with. I was really interested in ancient Egypt and the mysteries that surrounded their culture and those of South America – pyramid cultures – I’d learned to recognise some basic heiroglyphics and cartouches and had always been fascinated by the rosetta stone. Egyptian art, Meso-American, Maori and Chinese art and sculpture were powerful influences. The philosophy and religion of those cultures were responsible for their art. Taoism inspired most of the early Chinese jade work. In the Vatican, the bible inspired the artwork, while in Egypt, gods and pharaohs-as-gods were produced as sculptures.
"My interest in jade was piqued by meeting Theo Schoon and attending his lecture on Chinese jade; and by the work of Peter Hughson and Bill Mathieson snr."
Boustridge began prospecting for jade at 16 when he got his drivers licence and could travel to the Marsden jade field. Gradually he developed an understanding of the geological deposition of the hard green stone. On one of these explorations he met Bill Mathieson Snr in the bush. Bill became a great friend and mentor, but refused to allow him to see the carving process, closely guarding the skill. Boustridge set up his own workshop three years later and taught himself.
"My first workshop was in my grandmother's chookhouse, the chooks having been long gone. Although sceptical at first, my parents supported me in my endeavours by allowing me to raid their freezer when I couldn't afford food, and they bought my most expensive piece from my first solo exhibition at CSA in Christchurch in1976."
Ian Boustridge Approach to Jade Sculpture
"It's taken a lifetime to become confident with my own style in the much larger sculptures I create now."
Revelling in working with stone that is millions of years old, Boustridge takes a playfully intuitive approach to the process of interpreting the stone to see what artefact might emerge.
"I have a series of half-ton and multi-ton boulders and will spend the rest of my life sculpting those into art. My inspiration is the water-worn rock and the age of these stones which you know will be around for thousands more years because they’re virtually indestructible."
Shades of Brancusi and Henry Moore influence his simpler organic forms. Polishing brings out the colour and lucidity, and his special techniques provide a Giacometti style of erosion in other forms which bring out the structure of the stone. In his early sculptures he strove for a technically perfect Chinese style of precision and complexity with immaculate finishes and high polishes, but later he developed matt finishes, and played with combinations of matt and polished surfaces."
One of his recent large pieces, in fact the largest jade sculpture in NZ, is a two ton public water feature sited outside the Greymouth Post office. It incorporates a combination of five different finishes applied to its surface, and is an example of the types of form Boustridge likes to create today. His current works are organic and eroded. "I like to think that if I put them back into the bush or in the river and people found them, that they would be confused as to whether nature or the hand of man had made them."
Source: Theresa Sjoquist interview with Ian Boustridge - December 2011
