Don Driver: Magician

Abstract or Summary

A documentary on the controversial art and career of New Zealand’s foremost assemblage sculptor, abstractionist and pop artist. Don Driver is New Zealand’s foremost assemblage sculptor and collage artist. He lives and works in the town of New Plymouth in Taranaki, an area that is rural in character but with strong trade links to the rest of the world through a busy seaport. Driver’s prolific output reflects the complex character of the region. He draws on the visual richness of his rural ‘gothic’ environment but with the sophistication and awareness of the modernist movements in international art. A record of the artist working in his studio is the starting point for a discussion of the far-reaching implications of his art, how he represents a line through the central themes of modernism and into the cultural elaborations of pop and abstraction.