Bridgetown artist Kim Perrier wins again at the 2022 Castaways Sculpture Awards

A celebrated Bridgetown artist has won again at the 2022 Castaways Sculpture Awards in Rockingham in October.

Kim Perrier was awarded the Fremantle Ports people’s choice award at the annual art event that celebrates artistic innovation and environmental awareness which ran from October 22 to 30.

Mr Perrier’s piece Fractured Time received the most votes from the public in the main exhibition — the second year his work has achieved this acclaimed status.

The Canadian-born artist said he was honoured to have received the award for his all-aluminium sculpture.

“I’ve had this piece for a couple of years now and I was waiting for the right time to use it and then fate, fate delivers when it’s meant to in my books,” he said.

“I found this ring in a pile of junk and I originally thought it was concrete,” he said.

“I realised it was aluminium and for the longest time we tried to figure out what it was.

“Finally at the Cataways exhibition I met an aeronautics engineer from the UK and he just immediately said it was a flange off the front of a jet engine which is phenomenal for the piece because that brings in its own stories.”

Mr Perrier said he found it hard to describe in short-form what Fractured Time was about, however, it became apparent early in the creative process that the theme of time featured heavily in the piece.

“I have a hard time saying this but she’s the mother of time and she’s trying to turn back time and the numerals on the base are getting sucked down into a black hole so a timeless space so that’s symbolising the time being swept away,” he said.

“Strangely though when we first began I knew I wanted a women balancing in this ring and moving the ring but the rest of it, the timepiece, the fact that it’s a clockface, everything developed over time.”

Mr Perrier — who has been creating art since the early 70s — said he used a live model to cast in the ring which is a process called bodycasting he only begun practicing in the last decade.

“My background is in high-realism wildlife sculpture,” he said.

“So for many years I worked with bronze and I taught myself how to cast lead crystal glass. . . this is what I was doing in the 1980s but the people factor has mainly just come along in the last (few years), since 2015.”

Some of Mr Perrier’s works can now be found in the Perrier Sculpture Garden in Bridgetown which has recently opened for viewing and purchasing.