APRIL Pine credits Sculpture by the Sea as the reason she was able to transition to a fulltime sculptor after a six-year career in architecture.
“I have always been extremely creative but the art world is very precarious and a high-risk career where you either do extremely well or you don’t,” said Pine, who studied architecture at Curtin University.
“So becoming an architect was more like a logical choice.
Get in front of tomorrow's news for FREE
Journalism for the curious Australian across politics, business, culture and opinion.
READ NOW“The interesting thing was that I was always a very artistic and conceptual architect, so my art used to influence my architecture and now architecture influences my art.
“If you look at any of my works I come from a training of being very polished, edited and refined; they borrow from each other.”
Pine first exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe in 2017, using architectural software to create her sculpture.
“It just went really well and then I showed in Sydney (Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi), which went even more crazy and then that allowed me to go full-time,” Pine said.
“Because of Sculpture by the Sea, I’ve made over 30 sculptures in the last year. I just did Bondi in October and I had my first international sale with two works going to Portugal, one work going to New Zealand and two works staying locally in Sydney. It’s amazing that can happen.”
The Stirling sculptor works out of her Perth studio using corten, which is weathered steel that “has a raw Australian character.”
Her piece called Shifting Horizon for this year’s Sculpture by the Sea in Cottesloe features three different versions of the same stoic and reflective human figure.
“They just did so well at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi that I was asked to put them in this exhibition, so I’ve made some new ones,” Pine said.
“They act like guardians or protectors of the landscape and are three of the same figure, but one is extremely minimal and another is extremely dense. They stand at 2m tall and vary from 100 to 300kgs each.
Pine said she encouraged exhibition goers to look through her sculptures up to the sky, while their dynamic nature sees them disappear and become solid when moving around them.
“The rusty brown goes well with our iconic blue sky and ocean,” she said.
“It’s like an Australian desert colour married with blue ocean. There are a lot of Australian references in the work.”
The 15th annual Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe is on from March 1 to 18.