Smashed cars top gear for NSW sculptor
He’s the archetypal bloke. He loves bikes and cars – so much so that he’s even applied to host the Australian version of the popular SBS motoring show Top Gear, (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=4dHGPL-SeoM&feature=related) He renovates houses and earns his living as a smash repairer, running the business first started 27 years ago by his father.
But Daniel Clemmett, from Clunes near Byron Bay in northern New South Wales, is also a sculptor whose works are now in private collections around the world including Japan, USA, Monaco, New Zealand and the UK. Last year he won the $20,000 Acquisitive Award in the Swell Sculpture Festival at Currumbin on Queensland’s Gold Coast. His entry, Ammonite, was made from recycled car bonnets and has now been acquired by the Gold Coast City Council. Soon he’ll be heading to England to take up a two month residency with the Montgomery Sculpture Trust, which was established in Buckinghamshire in 1994 by philanthropist Bryan Montgomery, to promote the work of sculptors whose works are designed for outdoors.
It is a career that nearly didn’t happen. No-one in Clemmett’s family was an artist and Clemmett himself was failing art at school until a teacher took him aside.
“My Year 9 art teacher, Sandra Rauth, could see that I could draw and was always making these weird contraptions out of metal. So she said ‘Why don’t you put the two things together to see if I can pass you?’ So I did and I made an absolute monstrosity of a thing. She entered it for me in the local craft festival and it won first prize and $300. It was great because for me, that meant a motorbike,” he laughs.
Clemmett says apart from being passionate about creating art, his works are a response to the materials readily at his feet. “Running a smash repair business means I am surrounded by a huge amount of junk and I am right into recycling. My works have a strong ecological focus.” He says that Ammonite (pictured), is based on an extinct group of marine animals. It is made of twisted car bonnets, is 3.5 metres in diameter and took about 2,000 hours to create. He says if he was prepared to live very modestly, he could survive on his earnings as an artist. But until that happens, he’s hanging on to his day job repairing smashed cars. That’s unless he gets the call to be the next presenter of Top Gear.
