Rather, in considering Butcher’s works, I find an introspection that is driven by materiality that has a very personal connection, over form or narrative. One can’t help but situate these works alongside the home of Butcher and Cockburn – essentially just a larger corten steel box on the same property (which Butcher has built).

To add another American great alongside Judd and Rothko, Unhurried Study #6 wells memories of Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. Its classic horizon line division evokes an inky night sky over an earthy field. While it is a stretch to call these sculptures landscapes, Butcher’s alert embrace of arts aesthetic lineages could also find an Australian trigger in the colonial zips – the 9 by 5 Impressionist paintings of the late 19th century (aka Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton), which diffuse the landscape into jewels of light, atmosphere, weather and moment. In essence, they were about recording time. While Coburn says Butcher’s works ‘ask you to be comfortable with the colour black’, equally, they are about time. To use a fashionable term of our day, they embrace ‘slow art’. They invite a consideration of time in a lateral sense – made over 12 years, the metal rusted in real time, and the passion for refined aesthetic that is the culmination of a lifetime of making.

And if ever there was a study of form and material – captured like a haiku – it is Unhurried study #2, the blatant presentation of a cube of cast glass, a cube of rusted steel sheet and a cube of swarf (the end filings from a drill press cast into a form through the rusting process). Surface is everything.