Tall Order

Ronnie van Hout’s artwork at Potters Park in Mt Eden, Auckland, is a massive undertaking in scale and skill.

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Tell us about ‘Boy Walking’. Who is he and where is he going?

I try not to refer to Boy Walking in gendered terms, so I refer to the sculpture as an ‘it’, and think of it simply as a child. So, it’s a child that’s walking. Rather than just asking where the figure is going, the question could also be: where has it been? Movement is between departure and arrival and implies a present that’s always shifting from the past into the future. Children may relate to the work as in the state they feel themselves in (growing, experiencing). For adults, it may evoke the return to eternal childhood, which is static and nostalgic, among other things.

You say the inspiration was drawn from your 1995 ‘Mephitis’ series of black-and-white photographic prints, which is held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Can you expand on this?