Ben Buchanan's vinyl art works at Dowse

VINYL COUNTDOWN: Ben Buchanan works on Forever in preparation for its unveiling at the Dowse Art Museum on Saturday.

Even before being completed, Ben Buchanan's giant Forever on the walls of the Dowse Art Museum is simply stunning.

At first glance the viewer is not only hypnotised by the mandala-like symmetry, the hued patterns or the prominent black abyss at its centre, but the sheer scale of the artwork. Many viewers will feel as if they have been enveloped or absorbed by it.

It occupies at least three walls in a section of the gallery as part of the show Solo: Four Wellington Artists. By the time it's unveiled on Saturday, Forever will also have spilled out on to some of the floor and further along the walls, bending around corners as if it's a rapidly growing organism.

Wellington-based Buchanan has created the work using hand-cut signwriter's vinyl. The sticky sheets, which come in a wide variety of colours, are most often used for billboards. But Buchanan, who occasionally also creates works in paint, has made the modern medium  which is also popular with some other artists  one of his trademarks.

For about a month ahead of the show, sections of Forever were made on 12 panels in Buchanan's Mt Victoria studio. But a large proportion has been created from scratch in the gallery and then placed on the walls and floor. It will exist as a work only during the four months of the exhibition.

"Its' about infinity," Buchanan says, as he chooses another sheet of vinyl, makes a few cuts with a ruler and scalpel and then places it on the wall. "It's the idea that I could keep doing it forever. It could keep expanding outward. It's kind of the same with these works. There's always more I can do. There's always another colour I can add and every part of it changes the overall effect."

It's impressive enough to see Buchanan create on the spot as he also talks about this art. But it's almost jaw-dropping when he explains that he doesn't work from any preliminary drawings, sketches or blueprints. That includes plotting designs and measurements on graph paper or using a computer program.

"I would, I just don't know how to," he says.

Instead, Buchanan's works always spill straight out of his head as he creates them. "I've just kind of got a system of making something and I just go ahead and do that. I don't do any preparatory drawings. I just see what happens when I get into the space. I just use what's available to me, which is vinyl and a scalpel and a ruler. That's all I really need to make this.

"It's just the same as choosing paints. Rather than mixing them, it's just about playing with the colours [and] putting the colours together. I've got a plan of what it looks like, but it changes as I go, which is what keeps it interesting for me. It's a response to the space. I wasn't going to go up to the roof [of the gallery for Forever] but I've decided to do that now."

Buchanan has been working with vinyl since 1998. "The main way I got into it was that I was painting a lot [at the time]. I was masking a lot of edges while painting and spending a lot of time using masking tape  more time using the masking tape than the actual painting. When I started using vinyl it was like 'Ah. I've been doing this already'. So it was kind of really easy for me to start doing it and it was a quicker way to make a painting."

Buchanan has occasionally mixed vinyl and paint in the same work, but for the past five years he has concentrated almost exclusively on vinyl. The sizes vary  some can be very small pieces. But other large gallery works have included Sleeping for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2009. Buchanan has exhibited widely and many of his works are in private collections. "I never do any figurative work. I'm not interested in any explicit narrative in the work. I really like the abstract nature of this."

Dowse Art Museum curator Emma Bugden, who has overseen the group exhibition, first saw Buchanan's work in Auckland. She was later keen to commission Buchanan to create a site-specific work for the gallery after one of his smaller works was displayed in the space last year as part of a Wallace Art Awards exhibition. "Ben's work is very physical and very architectural ... and deeply perplexing. We hung his [previous] work right there in the middle of this room. I spent six weeks looking at his work and I kept thinking 'wouldn't it be amazing if it just kept on going?'. And I kept thinking, 'it could'. It just looked like it didn't want to stop."

The Details

Solo: Four Wellington Artists, Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, May 12-August 19.

- © Fairfax NZ News