Sgt Pepper taught the band to play
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5:00AM
Thursday April 03, 2008
By Adam Gifford
Jim Cooper with Sgt P, the work of more than one year. Photo / Martin Sykes
A poster in a music shop inspired Jim Cooper's version of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. "I thought that would be nice to build," says Cooper, who teaches ceramics at Otago University art school in Dunedin.
It took over a year to make the 100-plus figures that make up Sgt P, a fanciful recreation of the cover and of the 1960s.
It's a long way from the brown pots Cooper started out making in home town Westport in the early 1980s, at the tail end of the pottery boom. There were potters all up and down the coast road, many of them former coalminers inspired into clay by Northlander Yvonne Rust, who taught in a Greymouth high school in the 60s.
"I was fed by the Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada tradition," Cooper says. "I didn't start using coloured glazes until I went to [Dunedin] art school in 1984 and had access to the magazines."
Cooper went back to school in 1989, when he really started playing around with coloured glazes and building figures, making the shift from potter to sculptor. "That was more who I was. [The Leach tradition] was about discipline. This is not. It's about getting in and all the excesses of living.
