Background
Born in Sydney in 1951, multi-media artist John Lyall studied sound and performance at the Sydney College of the Arts, graduating with a BA (Visual Arts) in 1982. Moving to New Zealand in 1983, he graduated from the Auckland Secondary Teachers Training College (Art and Art History) in 1984 and earned an MFA from Elam in 1993.
Lyall’s multi-disciplinary background has ensured that he continues to work in many media. He has presented performances in Japan, South Korea, UK, Australia and NZ, including the Nine Dragon Headsart symposium (Korea); Artspace’s inaugural Sound/Watch festival, Auckland. (1989); SoundCulture, Tokyo (1993); and the inaugural Auckland Triennial: Bright Paradise (2001). Lyall’s interest in the bizarre ways nature can become culture are evident in books he has co-authored and his contributions to numerous international publications. He is perhaps best known for his exquisite, large-format photographs featuring strange depictions of nature from the partially demolished Bird Hall, Auckland Museum.
Much of Lyall’s practice responds to NZ iconography. His preoccupation with the moa started on the first day he arrived in NZ in 1983. A BBC team was in NZ, filming a Japanese doctoral student in Fiordland. Convinced the birds were not extinct, the ‘moa hunter’ had made a sounding device (supposedly replicating the moa’s voice), sending amplified, computer-generated ‘moa calls’ out across the fiords – there was no answer. The tale of unrequited love was explored in Lyall’s ‘cyber-opera’, Electronic Moa, performed as a part of SoundCulture, Auckland (1999), and later at Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
Since then, moas have featured regularly in Lyall’s work – oil stick drawings, iPad drawings, moa silhouettes (created out of vintage Meccano and clockwork train tracks) and a flickering two and a half metre tall moa outline in coloured LED lights. In an exhibition in the ARKO Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2010), he displayed photographs of a moa tattoo, and a fibreglass moa he had spotted, oddly, in a Seoul bakery during an earlier visit.