Texts
The transparent and reflective texts bind legible presence with physical absence. Extending the idea of 'glazing' beyond function and into form and content, the glass works present the finishing layer or varnish that would typically protect or mediate art. While 'Glazed I's' suggest impaired vision, clarity occurs in a repeating, visual and audible stutter.
Frames
Combining portraiture and landscape, the Frames capture and reflect the view and viewer. Where a frame usually contains and fixes an image, the glass Frames develop multiple layered images in a play of transparency, reflection, shadow and light. Stretching technical limits, the cut and toughened glass holds liquid, solid and air in a finely balance, resolved and robust form.
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. Lawn Painting develops a new form: organic abstraction.
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 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
A new series combining traditional painting media, high gloss automotive paint and marine plywood explores the edges between silence and noise. More than 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, thermal painting mimics the function and form of the ubiquitous concrete block using slender, featherweight, new media. Carved, compressed and framed, the concrete series explores the effects of the ‘concrete art’ movement in stripping emotion from abstraction within a context of nation-building ideals.
Nappy Painting
Repeating units of stacked newborn nappies/diapers stretch open in soft and absorbing monochromatic grids. Estimated to take over 500 years to breakdown in landfill, the unused readymades meet art conservation standards while filling substrates and walls, dampening noise and loading space with potential meaning. Concerns about vunerability, the naked body, and memory expand into wider questions of identity, 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 in 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 refer to birds as a metaphor for beauty and survival. Bird-like objects emerge from and adapt to adverse contexts. 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.
Muses
Dark, intimate and distant, the Muses embody ideals defining 'woman' from mythology and antiquity, and in contemporary sculpture by Paolini and Kiefer among others. Adopting the form of the feminist symbol and of a pawn in the game of chess, the three Muses suppress individual differences and strike a collective pose. In classical triangular composition, multiples of three repeat in feet and long splindly legs that gain presence and strength in numbers.
Feminine and masculine qualities unfold and compete in form, materials and curving lines of bulb and pedestal. A glossy feathered mane is confined and clamped at the neck. Beauty appears under restraint, reflected and released only in the eye of the beholder.