Chauncey Flay

  • Chauncey Flay - Seawall
  • Chauncey Flay - Seawall
  • Chauncey Flay - Seawall
  • Chauncey Flay - Seawall
  • Chauncey Flay - Seawall
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Chauncey Flay - Seawall #25

Created over nine months in Rarotonga, Seawall is a limited series of 100 hand-made sculptures. Each work represents a single block from an imagined seawall, using reclaimed coral combined with contemporary construction materials to reflect on rising sea levels, overtourism, and environmental pressure on Pacific island communities.

All coral used in these works is non-living, many decades old, and was salvaged from demolished buildings. No material was taken from the marine environment. The works were imported to New Zealand with full CITES permits.

Each sculpture is unique and presented in a custom-made white presentation box, conceived as a collectible contemporary object.

  • Reclaimed coral, fibre cement board, concrete, glass, polyfiller, mastic
  • 2024-2025
  • approx. 150 × 100 × 100 mm
  • Limited series

A larger sculpture by Chauncey Flay can be found on the Sculpture Trail. To read more about it, click here.

$1,750.00
$1,750.00
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Chauncey Flay - Seawall
Chauncey Flay - Seawall
Chauncey Flay - Seawall
Chauncey Flay - Seawall
Chauncey Flay - Seawall

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Artist Bio

 

Flay grew up in New Plymouth and studied art at the Auckland University of Technology. He then travelled to Germany and Poland before settling for a number of years in the Cook Islands. Though he recently returned to his hometown, the experience of living and working in the Islands remains a major influence on his practice.​

Chauncey's practice brings together a diverse range of materials including coral, concrete, brick and stone which he ties into a few key concepts around entropy, time, and our relationship with the physical world.

​The location and context of where the material comes from is an important aspect of the work. This is explored through a laborious and reductive physical process of deconstruction and reconstruction of materials from which an austere yet compelling aesthetic is produced.

​Chauncey turns commonplace materials into objects with value and meaning, completely shifting our appreciation of them.

“In all my works there is a physical process of breaking and putting back together. The language of geometry references architecture as a healing and rebuilding process. The faceting of stone is a slow and meditative reductive process that expresses the relationship between matter and time.” 

 

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