MOLLY MACALISTER (b. 1920), New Zealand
STANDING FIGURE
Coloured concrete 40 ins
Purchased 1959
 

ALISON DUFF, New Zealand
HEAD OF HILLARY
Cement 16 ins
Purchased 1959

Owing to a lack of facilities for bronze casting in this country, we find a considerable amount of sculpture being done here at the present time is cast in concrete and cement. The two recent acquisitions reproduced on this page fall into such a category. Both were shown a few months ago in an exhibition of Three Auckland Sculptors (Severs, Duff, MacAlister) in the First Floor Gallery, which was inaugurated this year for special small exhibitions. (See Quarterly 10).

Both Alison Duff and Molly MacAlister are New Zealand sculptors of some years standing, and both studied at the Canterbury' School of Art under Francis Shurrock. Molly MacAlister has experimented in various directions, but recently, as the result of the coming to New Zealand of a young English sculptor, Anne Severs, she has received a fresh impetus, discernible in this STANDING FIGURE, and is producing work allied to what might be called the rebirth of ' naturalism ' in contemporary European sculpture. Alison Duff's HEAD OF HILLARY is the result of a painstaking refinement and enlargement of the elements which go to make up this celebrated mountaineer's head — itself, in its craggy simplicity, a symbol of his particular achievement. Altogether she has modelled five heads of Hillary, of which this is the final, most ' abstract' statement.

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