THERE is something whimsical and quirky about Harry Hummerston's prints and sculptures. Among his works now on show at Artplace Gallery in Claremont is a lead model lifeboat, with wheels at the stern and a tiny figure supporting its bow - as if trying to push it backwards.
Inside the boat is water, and floating on the top are the tiny figures of drowned pigs.
The sculpture reflects Hummerston's off-beat view that the world is not always a safe place, and that traditional havens - such as a lifeboat-may not always offer the protection one expects.
In other words in Hummerston's dysfunctional world, things are just as likely to fall apart or suddenly be reversed, unsettling us rather than
offering a reliable guide to the universal laws of nature and human behaviour.
In another sculpture entitled Digging Up Your Back Yard, a boy's toy tip truck has become bogged in mud. The tray of the truck is tipped
backwards and spilling out is soil embedded with dozens of tiny skulls. Look closer and you see that the tip truck has no back wheels. Another example of the dysfunctional world of men and machinery, perhaps.
Then there is the horse that has lost its legs. The legs lie piled underneath a trolley bearing the limbless animal.
"I suppose I'm fascinated by objects and machinery that are not working when they're supposed to be, or have repaired so many times that they no longer work explains Hummerston.
His series of prints that complement his sculptures at Artplace are in similar whimsical vein.
They hark back to every boy's fascination with drawing submarines, warships and aeroplanes. Heroically detailed drawings of war machinery in crude, childlike style, are superimposed on the diagrammatic instructions for assembling those toy factory models of planes and ships given to boys as a birthday presents.
Once again, they show Hummerston's fascination with the discrepancy between romance and reality, between the perfect technology of the toy factory and the imaginative response of the child.
"Male baby boomers like myself will relate to the idea of drawing those World War II tanks and planes, says Hummerston "In your imagination you were the pilot or the engineer, and always in control - at least in your drawings.
"But when your parents gave you a toy model it was too complicated to assemble. Either parts were missing, or bits didn't fit together properly. The model never turned out as you imagined. It never turned out as good as the picture on the box or as good aa the drawing from your imagination.
Hummerston teaches print-making in the fine arts course at Curtin University. Born in Wagin, he initially trained as a primary school teacher
before becoming an art teacher through specialist training at the WA Institute of Technology (now Curtin University).
After teaching art at various primary and high schools for some years he went to Albany TAFE and helped to set up the first Curtin Fine Art course in the town.
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Ron Banks
