Tablets
Carved in stone, a series of letter-numbers trace the evolution of gesture from early cave markings to modern texts. Counterweights to the series of reflective and translucent glass sculptures, the Tablets bring density and weight to the articulated form.
Monuments
The Monument expands in scale and effect through it's containment of absence, play of shadow and depth in reflection, creating multiple planes out of minimalist form. Internal curves and mirrored surfaces offer moments of calm amidst constant movement. The monolithic abstraction asserts the present in a continuum of icons and symbols from a cultural, spiritual and political past.
Texts
Transparent, reflective Texts bind legible presence with physical absence. Taking glazing beyond function and into form and content, the glass works expose the finishing layer or varnish that typically protects and mediates art. 'Glazed I's' suggest impaired vision and clarity is subject to a repeating visual and audible stutter.
Frames
Combining portraiture and landscape, the transparent glass Frames capture and reflect view and viewer. Where a frame usually outlines, contains and fixes an image, the Frames develop multiple layered images through a play of transparency, reflection, shadow and light. Stretching technical limits, the cut and toughened glass holds liquid, solid and air in finely balanced robust forms.
Lawn Painting
Wall hung and alive, the lawn work is constructed from specially prepared grass turf, woven and stitched onto canvas supports. The readymade, set into constant reproduction and endless cycles of growth and dormancy, becomes a 'beingmade' and carves a direct relationship between artwork, gallery, environment, curator and collector. Where abstract forms may be considered cool and distanced, the Lawn Painting presents Organic Abstraction: wet, warm and needy.
Lawn Sculpture
Embedded as in-ground installation or object positioned outdoors, the grass sculpture connects with land art and fluxus. Initially precise squares and circles expose the dichotomy of independent opposites. Left to their own devices, the forms deny their formal constraints to swell, merge and recede, responding to shifts in seasons and changes in climate.
Magnetic Painting
Tens of thousands of fine polished steel pins hover on magnetic or painted fields of canvas and linen, shifting and shimmering with movement, shadow and light. Like the grass works, the pins suggest multiple brushstrokes, expressionist gestures in a metallic landscape. Defying gravity, the work suspends the process of making, and positions painting as never still.
Wire Works
Suspended and strained into shape, the wire works operate under tension, requiring negotiation and care. Connected to mains electricity or dressed in barbs, the wire is problematic - fencing and tempting viewers to engage, touch or avoid. A sharp refrain shadowing the Glass I's, the wire texts regulate and monitor the pulse of multiple personas.
Ply Painting
Exploring the edges between silence and noise, a new series combines traditional painting media, high gloss automotive paint and marine plywood. Over 20 layers of paint produce sleek smooth surfaces - mirrored planes with unending depth. Precisely calculated proportions inform a geometric abstraction that uses formulae and perception as both constraining and liberating mechanisms.
Concrete Painting
Absorbing warmth by day and emitting heat at night, the block paintings mimic the function and form of the ubiquitous concrete block using slender, featherweight, new media. Carved, compressed and framed, the block works return warmth to a ‘concrete art’ movement that stripped emotion from abstraction within a context of nation-building ideals.
Nappy Scapes
Repeating units of stacked newborn nappies/diapers stretch open in a soft and absorbing monochromatic grid. Estimated to take over 500 years to breakdown in landfill, the unused readymades exceed art conservation standards while padding substrates and walls, dampening noise and loading space with potential meaning. Questions of vunerability, nakedness, and memory expand into wider issues of culture, conservation and universality.
Still Painting
A series of embedded texts revealed via short and long term exposure to ultraviolet light develop and document the relationship between art and its context. Harnessing the ‘harsh New Zealand light’ praised by modernist painters but feared by art conservators, the Still Paintings require new conservation conventions. In a reversal of genre and process, the landscape does the painting.
Pretext
Language and numbers underpin a multimedia series of notations or working drawings - painted, punctuated, printed, and layered with shifting degrees of certainty. Where drawing typically commences a series of work, preceding the ideas and texts it may generate, the Pretext works critique the work in progress, and the changes in media, process, and perspective.
Bird Works
A series in oils, feathers, and ink render birds as a monochromatic metaphor of beauty and survival. Soft organic material is bound and encased in cool surfaces, drawing the spectator to the artwork and connecting the artwork to primal and earthy contexts. Reconfigured and beaked objects suggest adaptation to adverse environments.
Muses
Dark, intimate and distant, the three Muses embody ideals defining 'woman' from mythology and antiquity, and seen in contemporary sculptures by Paolini and Kiefer among others. Adopting a duplicitous form - the feminist symbol, the male Phallus, and the Pawn in the game of chess, the Muses suppress individual differences and strike a collective pose. In classical triangular composition, multiples of three repeat in feet and long legs, gaining presence and strength in numbers. Beauty appears under restraint and is reflected in the eye of the beholder.