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One Day Sculpture

ONE DAY SCULPTURE (www.onedaysculpture.org.nz) emerged from Doherty’s Research Fellowship at Massey University in 2006. Developed over three years, it was New Zealand’s first nationwide series of temporary, place-based commissioned public artworks. Co-organised with the Litmus Research Initiative at Massey University in Wellington, ONE DAY SCULPTURE was conceived as a hybrid form of exhibition, curated collaboratively with thirteen arts organisations based in every major city of New Zealand including the National Museum in Wellington. The project involved twenty international and New Zealand-based artists, each of whom was invited to produce a new work that occurred during a discrete 24-hour period over the course of one year, August 2008-May 2009. An international symposium on art, place and time took place in March 2009. The intellectual coherence of the project was maintained through a live series of commissioned responses during the course of the project, which were then republished in One Day Sculpture, edited by Doherty and David Cross in 2009, which both documents and extends the series. The co-authored introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the project and its conceptual implications for durational public art practices.

The temporal parameters of ONE DAY SCULPTURE activated a series of distinct outcomes, one of which was to treat each work as having an opening event thereby creating a temporary audience for their unveiling as public artworks. This innovation led to Claire Doherty being awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award 2009 for Outstanding Creative Entrepreneurs and a New Zealand Research Award for ‘the most defining research of the decade within the College of Creative Arts at Massey University, New Zealand’. The innovative curatorial aspects of the project are discussed by Terry Smith in Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: ICI, 2012).