Dennis Wins more Awards

In November 2021 Dennis Wilson won the Boddington Open Sculptural Prize with ‘Mates for Life’, Black Cockatoos on a power pole and he also won the second prize with the sculpture ‘Little Pied Cormorants’.

These two awards are just the latest in an ever growing lists of awards.

The Dunsborough ‘Sculpture by the Bay’ was cancelled this year because of Covid-19, but Dennis is hoping the ‘Pemberly of Pemberton’ Sculptures in the Vines will still go ahead, Dennis being a past winner of both competitions. He has a metal sculpture of a leafy tree with blue wrens and robin red breasts to enter into this competition.

Dennis makes award winning sculptures from scrap steel, leaf springs, clutch plates, farm machinery, old gas cylinders, really anything made of metal that can be cut, ground and bent, so he can then repurpose these items by turning them into award winning outdoor sculptures.

When Dennis retired around nine years ago, he enrolled himself in a TAFE course where he learned to weld.

“I was taught arc welding, mig welding and oxy welding, I couldn’t get along with the mig welder, the arc welding seems to work quite well for me.

“I’m not sure where I’ve got the ability to make metal sculptures from,” Dennis was pondering, “My Grandfather was a blacksmith, maybe it’s in the genes, it gives me a sense of delight mingled in with joy to create a sculpture from scrap which people admire.

“Not all my ideas or inspirations work out, some pieces I have commenced, I just cannot find the inspiration to finish, but other pieces have a life of their own, they literally just come to life as I make them.

“Of late I have been powder coating parts of the sculptures, a rusting patina suits certain structures, but with the birds, Blue Wrens, Robin Red breast which are such colourful birds, the bright powder coated colours bring them to life.

“With the reinforcing bars I use for the structure to hold the birds I will wash with vinegar to achieve a rusted look and then I coat the sculpture with outdoor lacquer to maintain the patina.”

Dennis has always been a collector and he just loves recycling and repurposing used steel objects into sculptures.

Mattamattup Farm, Cheryl and Dennis’s property, was part of the Bridgetown Open Gardens last year. The property has around 100 acres, most of the farm is leased out but Cheryl has a very large garden around the house. It mostly has roses, in a wide variety.

Dennis has his sculptures scattered around the garden, this year with around 648 visitors to the open garden, he managed to sell a great deal of his pieces.

On the property there is also a large old packing shed where Dennis, as a collector, has stored his treasures.

In the packing shed there is a butcher’s wall display, with cleavers and various hangers for the different carcasses, as well as a shearing wall with different size blade shearers and bail stencils.

Another wall in the packing shed carries the stencils of the varieties of apples which used to be picked on the property, the apple trees being cleaned out in 1993 with the codling moth infection, a drama which was damaging to a lot of properties around Bridgetown.

Dennis also once collected copper pictures, he has a whole wall of pictures, this art form was very popular when copper was cheap.

A friend pulled up some old Lino and found a whole series of 1960s West Australian newspapers, they thought it would be just the gift that Dennis would prize, this was around the time when the Queen and her husband visited Western Australia. I remember this time; I was one of those who lined the Perth airport road to get a fleeting glimpse of the royal couple as they travelled past.

Much to Cheryl’s chagrin, thinking these objects are hidden away, they were a draw card to husbands whose wives were busy admiring the roses. The husbands who got into the old packing shed were hard to move.

Seeing figures in a patch of clouds is an example of what’s called pareidolia, Dennis imagines figures in piles of scrap metal, then he builds them.

“Most days I spend around 4 to 5 hours working on the sculptures, I then spend some time in the garden, all in all it is sculpting which keeps me off the streets.” Dennis stated with a sly grin.