Story: Sculpture and installation art

Robert Nettleton Field's work was revolutionary compared with the more conventional output of his New Zealand contemporaries. In 1934, the year after a trip to England where he saw the recent work of avant-garde British sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, he produced 'Wahine',  a small (15-centimetre-high) figure. A study of a Polynesian woman arranging her hair, it is carved from Cornish serpentine and its heavy masses suggest primitivist elements. The mood conveyed is one of brooding introspection.