TOUCHDOWN

The work, by artist Neil Dawson stands tall over The Morgans property and the valley of Transmission Gully. It is a skeletal representation of a feather being blown along the valley and touching the summit of one of the hillocks on its journey.

The history of the piece is that I saw Neil’s “Horizons” work on Gibbs Farm in 2021 and immediately rang him up to see if he could come up with something as imposing and iconic for our site. As our first commissioned work he was able to choose anywhere on the whole property to position the piece. After a site visit and within a few months he was back with a maquette and explanation of how he arrived at Touchdown.

Neil’s observation was that during his site visit he had noticed bird feathers tumbling along the fairways of our golf course as the nor’wester did its thing. Touchdown, at 17m in height and 22 tonne, is Neil’s embodiment of that phenomenon. An engineering design and manufacturing challenge of some magnitude followed.

Helen Dawson of Lewis Bradford in Christchurch was our engineering guru on this work while Duncan Fraser and his team at ACME Engineering in Petone were charged with the manufacture of the work and overseeing its installation. The central spine (rachis) of the piece is made of 16mm steel plate and there is no mill in New Zealand that roll steel of that thickness to the circumference we required. That job needed to be done in Melbourne. On arrival in New Zealand the three pieces of the spine were then cut longitudinally at ACME to enable the insertion of the steel reinforcing assemblies required to strengthen the junctions where the vanes of the feather intersect with the spine.

The whole work is a complexity of feathered junctions of rolled steel sections as the vanes are attached to the spine. How complex Mother Nature is. And all this built to a spec (thanks Helen) that can withstand the scale of wind that Wellington can deliver.

In parallel with the construction the preparation of the site presented its own challenges. While the sculpture was transported to the site in 3 sections, we constructed an assembly area adjacent to the hill of our choice. The final welding of sections took place there and then, a three-story plastic canopy “paint shop in a paddock” popped up just like that. Over the winter of 2023, Porirua-based commercial painting shop Steam and Sand performed their magic. Multiple coats of paint applied from the scaffolding, under the plastic tarp, all while industrial air driers kept the environment under the shroud, nice and warm. So warm in fact, that each morning the sheep had to be cleared out, the paint shop being their shelter that winter. Finally, with a tonne of paint on board, Touchdown was ready. Down with the plastic and scaffolding and then the arrival of cranes and a house removal trailer for the last leg of the journey.

Outside of the tent near to the assembly area plenty of action had been occurring. One task was drilling a hole into the top of the hill and filling it with 143 tonnes of concrete and reinforcing steel all topped with a lattice of substantial steel studs on to which the sculptures base plate would be screwed down.

The second exercise involved earthworks. In order for the crane to get close enough to the summit of the hill, we needed to carve an obscenely-sized L-shaped bench out of one side of the hill, gravel it so the house removal trailer and the crane could drive into position to lift Touchdown on to its foundation. Hovering above and aligning the suspended sculpture above the 34 studs that it was to lowered on to, was the final act – and one of fine alignment. Once rested, screw the bolts on to the studs, fill in the hole and rebuild the hill.

Touchdown has touched down.