This programmes starts at 00.50 after the blue graphic. Greer Twiss has been modelling the human figure for over 60 years. As a boy, his first figurative works took the form of puppets. After studying the figure from life at art school in the late 1950s marionettes gave way to the sculptured figures in iron, steel and bronze that quickly established his reputation as one of the most important emerging New Zealand artists of the 1960s. Towards the end of the 1960s Twiss scaled up his works to incorporate life-size body casts that were often disturbingly life-like in detail. Twiss's bathers and bikini girls encouraged viewers to see themselves as participants in a sculptural event rather than as detached observers. From the mid 1970s and throughout the 1980s Twiss made few direct references to the human form but by the early 1990s near life-size facetted figures in galvanized steel were populating his elaborate multi-media installations. Although he still regularly cast small scale bronzes, Twiss chose to use bent and welded sections of galvanized steel as his primary method of modelling life-size figures until quite recently when he returned to casting in iron. In his new series of 'winged' figurative works in iron he returns full circle to the methods he used to create his first tentative interpretations of the figure over 50 years ago.

The Arts Channel programme that looks at New Zealand and international artists and performers.