Ian Boustridge – New Zealand Jade Sculptor

Among the world’s best contemporary jade sculptors (National Geographic 1987), master sculptor Ian Boustridge works the green stone in his native New Zealand.
“I have a series of half-ton and multi-ton boulders from much earlier prospecting days,” says Ian Boustridge, “and it will take the rest of my life to sculpt from them the art hidden within. My inspiration is water-worn rock, the very age of these stones, and knowing they’ll be around for thousands more years because they’re virtually indestructible.”

New Zealand Jade Sculpture

Boustridge is one of New Zealand’s few master jade sculptors. Based in Greymouth on the wild west coast of the South Island, he loves jade, also known as greenstone, or in Maori, as pounamu, for its multiplicity of character across a range of spectrums. Those include colour, translucency, sound, feel, hardness, and toughness. Each quality enables a variety of end uses.

Boustridge (59) was one of the earliest full-time jade sculptors in New Zealand. Other jade-workers, such as Peter Hughson, Bill Mathieson Snr. Cliff Dalziel, and Theo Schoon, were a generation older and making jewellery, but Boustridge wanted to do something different. He produced a small, stylised vase which impressed Schoon when he saw it in a Christchurch gallery, unaware it had been made by a 19 year old student he had inspired five years earlier. Boustridge produced a 12″ high carved trout next, and soon others started to also sculpt the green stone.

 

Jade as Sonic Art

He began to produce spirals in his jewellery which evolved later through his sculptural work into tendrils. He sculpted one tendril specifically as sonic art – produced to take advantage of the stone’s inherent sonic qualities so it could be utilised as a type of instrument. The hard dense stone rings with an exceptionally pure tone when struck. Dr Chris Cree-Brown, Associate Professor and Dr of Music at Canterbury University, was inspired by the sculpture and composed a 13 minute work to utilise it. (sound bite?)

Jade Carving Influences

As one of Yvonne Rust’s 13 year old students at Greymouth High School in the latter 60s, Boustridge was much affected by her philosophies around art/craft and nature.

“She opened my eyes to exploring in the bush wilderness to find the raw materials with which to create artworks. I was really interested in ancient Egypt and the mysteries that surrounded that culture and those of South America – pyramid cultures – and 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 philosophies and religions of each of those cultures spawned their art. Taoism inspired most of the early Chinese jade work. In the Vatican, the bible inspired art, while in Egypt, gods and pharaohs-as-gods were given form as sculptures.

“My interest in jade was piqued by meeting Theo Schoon. I attended a lecture he delivered on Chinese jade; but I was also interested in the work of Peter Hughson and Bill Mathieson Snr.”

 

Boustridge began prospecting for jade at 16 when finally he got his drivers licence and could travel to the Marsden jade field on the West Coast. 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 he refused to let me see the carving process, and closely guarded his skills. I set up my own workshop three years later and taught myself.”

He made his first workshop in his grandmother’s hen-house, the chooks by then long gone. Although sceptical at first, his parents supported him in his endeavours, notably by allowing him to raid their freezer when he couldn’t afford food. They bought his most expensive work from his first solo exhibition at the Canterbury Society of Arts in Christchurch in 1976.

Ian Boustridge Approach to Jade Sculpture

“It’s taken a lifetime to become confident with my own style, especially with the much larger sculptures I create now.”

Revelling in the working of stone millions of years old, Boustridge takes a playful, yet intuitive approach to interpreting each jade boulder, to sensing and visualising the unique artefact that might emerge from the dark interior.

 

Shades of Brancusi and Henry Moore influence his simpler organic forms. They are polished to bring out the colour, and the lucidity. Boustridge employs hard-won expertise in specially developed techniques to confer a Giacometti style of erosion on other forms, thereby exposing the actual structure of the stone. In his early works he strove for a technically perfect Chinese-style of precision and complexity with immaculate finishes and high polishes, but in recent years, having developed matt finishes, he plays on the stone with combinations of matt and polished surfaces.

One of his recent large pieces, in fact the largest jade sculpture in NZ, is a two-tonne public water feature sited outside the Greymouth Post office. It incorporates a combination of five different finishes, and is an example of the types of form Boustridge creates 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

©Theresa Sjoquist