top of page

Llew  Summers: Body and Soul

Still available

Llew Summers: Body and Soul depicts the work and life of one of New Zealand’s most recognisable sculptors, a man of great warmth and astonishing vitality, whose works are daring, sensual and provocative.  Between April and June 2019, Llew recorded 95 interviews with John Newton and these, as well as a very extensive photographic and documentary archive, form the basis of this wonderful book, celebrating his life and achievements. John takes us from Llew’s beginnings as a self-taught artist, through his relationships and family life, to his success as a highly visible sculptor with works found in public spaces throughout New Zealand and held in collections here and internationally.

We follow his progression as an artist, a true independent, working outside the hierarchies of the art world. His early monumental works in concrete made him a public fixture, with themes of nurture and nature, sexuality and solidity seen in his idealised female forms. As he discovered carving in wood and marble, the work became more subtle and increasingly dynamic. From the early 2000s, following his first trip to Europe, religious imagery entered Llew’s work in ways that extended both his visual and thematic range, and introduced a more overtly spiritual element. His later career features depictions of Christ, angelic winged figures and large, ambitious works in bronze.

Illustrated with more than 200 photographs, including newly commissioned images, Llew Summers: Body and Soul is a joyful record of a life in sculpture and a testimony to the value of public art.  Now available.  Reviews can be found here and here.

And if you're not already persuaded... you might like to read an extract and interview about the book.

There's also a couple of personal recollections here, and here.

Cover capture.PNG

Winner of the 2020 NZSA Heritage Book Award for Canterbury/West Coast Non-fiction

Llew Summers: Body and Soul, by John Newton,

is published by Canterbury University Press with the support of Creative New Zealand

Catalogue  of works and visual identification guide

Available for download are two documents:

1. A Visual Identification Guide: thumbnail images, arranged numerically, with number and name of each work, and medium. This guide can be used in assocation with item 2.

2. Full Catalogue, arranged numerically, by year, with the title of the work, dimensions (where known) and medium, along with some notes, which may assist with identification. Where the work is known to be held in a gallery or is in a public space, that is also noted.

These two documents are as complete as possible at this time and are complementary, but if you have additional information or corrections, please use the Contact form to be in touch.

1_Llew with Short Back and Sides.jpg

Llew in 1967, with his first sculpture, Short Back and Sides.

Peace

Peace

In 2012 Llew made a large bronze, Encircling the Baroque (now installed on the Piazza in Timaru) comprising a circle of life; four human bodies flowing in a circle.  Returning to his other major preoccupation – wings – either solitary, on angels, horses or, more conventionally, on birds, he scaled up the smaller work, Birds of a Feather which was first carved in wood, and later cast in bronze, into another circle of life – this major bronze work: Peace.

The critic John Ruskin wrote: "For nature is all made up of roundnesses, not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces.  Boughs are rounded, stones are rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded; there is no more flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy.  The world itself is round and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work which is often very flat indeed." (The Elements of Drawing).  No such charge can be levied here – Peace is a work that speaks of the plump roundness of that avian symbol of love and peace: the dove, within a large circle of roundness.

Doves are most often associated with the concepts of pacifism and civil peace, and Llew was a pacifist, coming from a family with a heritage of pacifism; his mother was imprisoned during the Second World War for demonstrating against the war when it was illegal to do so.  It is natural then that this trio of birds is emblematic of his belief in peace as the greater, and only, solution.  As with Picasso, the work takes a stand for life against death and for peace against war.

Peace is a 2-tonne bronze measuring 2650x2100x1400mm.  

It is currently exhibited in Colombo St, Christchurch.

Flight

IMG_6880.JPG

Flight was unveiled on 12 August  2023 in its permanent home near the Estuary Causeway, near where Llew lived, as a permanent memorial to this much-loved & valued community member and nationally-recognised sculptor. A fitting and wonderful tribute.

bottom of page