Brilliant Rubbish: A Conversation with Robert Cherry
by Roger Boyce
Commanding the east window of Robert Cherry’s hillside studio, which he shares with his wife, painter Seraphine Pick, is the air traffic control tower of the Wellington Airport. Beyond, on the far horizon, one may glimpse a stony suburban seashore where the artist and his young son Joseph once beach-combed flotsam—forlorn, sometimes unidentifiable, mostly plastic, odds and ends—which later encrusted a small army of slouching clay stelae. The ungainly tabletop totems that populated Cherry’s 2006 exhibition “I’ve Let You Down and I’ve Let Myself Down” were the first of his works that I’d seen and the beginning of my keen interest in his eccentric and engaging sculptural practice.