Grand Head ... #210

Terry Stringer is a leading New Zealand sculptor. His signature works have become synonymous with high profile public sites throughout Aotearoa/New Zealand, including The Risen Christ in Christchurch's Cathedral Square, his Grand Head in Wellington which is in Victoria Street in front of the Te Renco building opposite the Lido Cafe. He has also completed The World Grasped for Newmarket, Auckland.

He trained at Elam School of Fine Arts graduating with Honours in 1967 and in the following years received virtually every significant scholarship and award available to New Zealand artists. In the late 1970s he was awarded the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Scholarship three times. He is a key figure in the history of art in New Zealand, a sculptor with an established reputation. This was acknowledged in 2003 when he was the recipient of the country's national honour, the ONZM (Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit).
In addition to public and private sculpture commissions, Terry Stringer has been involved in various theatrical projects. Downstage Theatre, Wellington commissioned him to design sets and costumes for Cabaret, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet for Images of Desire.

Throughout his career Stringer has exhibited extensively, with solo shows in Auckland, Sydney, Los Angeles and London. He lives and works at his sculpture park Zealandia, north of Auckland. "From the window of my studio the craggy island of Little Barrier sits across the horizon. My neighbours say its outline is Queen Victoria lying in state. In identifying this, the eye reads the range of hills as a narrative form, instead of merely a blue misty shape.This relates to the intellectual process of an artist. To make the human image the subject in an art work is to use that part of the brain that assesses the most subtle of signals. We have this specialised skill, and we delight in exercising it in the game of art, where the personality of a figure and the particulars of its situation can tell a detailed story."

Sculpture in the Gardens has given Stringer the incentive to work on a monumental scale, it is also a chance for him to enlarge on an idea he has previously had and to present it to a wide community.
His bronze sculpture contains column elements that carry different image fragments. Walk around the sculpture to see for yourself Stringer’s idea for the work - a subject that changes from one side of the sculpture to the other.