Peter Nicholls (artist)  Peter Nicholls (born 1936) is a New Zealand artist who creates large, outdoor works. His public art sculptures, often combining steel and native timbers, comment on the New Zealand landscape and its colonial history. Nicholls was born in Whanganui, New Zealand in 1936. He was educated at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, the Auckland Teachers' College, and the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts. In the 1960s he spent some time as an Auckland high school art teacher. In 1978–79 Nicholls completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, and in 1979 he became a Lecturer in Sculpture at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin, New Zealand, a position he held until 2001. Nicholls was married to the artist Di Ffrench for more than thirty years, until her death in 1999. He now lives and works in Dunedin, New Zealand. The Dunedin Public Art Gallery presented "Journeywork", a major retrospective of Nicholls's career, in 2008. Nicholls first gained critical notice in the early 1970s with "Probe", a series of large, outdoor works that used native kanuka timber to evoke the old log fences of rural New Zealand. Works from the series were displayed in 1972 outside the Osborne Gallery in Auckland and in 1973 at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial. According to art critic Jodie Dalgleish, "The "Probe" series had subtly begun to explore what would become Nicholls's central interest in an artistically motivated kind of physics concerned with the matter, energy, motion and force of sculptural structure and its interactions with natural and cultural forces." In the mid to late 1970s, Nicholls created his "New Land" sculpture series. Produced at a time when New Zealanders were reassessing their colonial history, the series explores the impact of settler culture on the native landscape. Nicholls is himself a descendant of the writer and missionary the Rev. Richard Taylor, who was present at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. "New Land III" (1975), made from chiselled beams of totara, wire, and steel, is today in the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. In 1978 Nicholls represented New Zealand at a Sculpture Symposium held in tandem with the Edmonton 1978 Commonwealth Games. While there, Nicholls created the thirteenth work in the "New Land" series, which would serve as the maquette for a major kinetic sculpture, "Counterpoise" (1978), commissioned for the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton.