I smell a Driver

The minute that you walk into Mahara Gallery Don Driver’s work demands attention. For many it’s visual attention that the exhibition requires of the gallery-goer. This is not the gentle calling for attention that you might get from a landscape painting but more a jumping-up-and-down, waving-your-hands-in-the-air and shrieking-at-the-top-of-your-lungs attempt to get noticed. As the works for the Don Driver show arrived at Mahara Gallery and while they were being unpacked I was struck not only by their strong colours, enormous size and strange shapes, but also by their smell.

The scent of them is certainly more subtle than their immediate visual impact but it is quite distinct and has the power to transport the “sniffer” to a very specific place or memory. Megan Dunn in her catalogue essay for this show describes her feeling upon seeing Don Driver’s work as being “[like] a daughter trespassing in her father’s toolshed”. Driver’s works smell like Dad’s toolshed too, just as recognisable as the smell of a second hand book shop, freshly cut grass or Proust’s madeleine. It is a musty mix of grease, armpits, oil and wood shavings. Definitely masculine. My Dad doesn’t have a toolshed or a dimly lit garage that he lurks in but if he did that smell would surely emanate from it. Instead the memory that springs to my mind when I take a whiff of one of Driver’s works is that of vintage aircraft and thus of my granddad who was in the RAF at the end of the Second World War.

Pocket & Saw, 1985
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist's estate and 
Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
Don Driver Exhibition at Mahara Gallery
9 December 2012 - 27 January 2013 

This multi-sensory experience is compelling. Did Driver intend for his work to smell or is the fragrance an accidental by-product of the materials he found and used? The memories the smells bring to the surface will be different for each of us but is there some commonality? What does the smell remind us of? I find myself imagining any number of Dad’s sheds in rural or semi-rural New Zealand that must have the same smells, objects and materials amassed, I’ve heard these places referred to as a “man caves”.

What are Don Driver’s comments on gender and masculinity in New Zealand? I find myself getting used to the smell as I sit here and type but, each week, as I return to the gallery I notice it afresh. If you could bottle it, you might label it “Man pour homme”.