Convulsive Beauty

We recently talked to Andrea du Chatenier about her latest exhibition at the gallery, Earthseed.

MNG: Earthseed seems like a ground-breaking exhibition for you. It brings together a number of your interests in a really gritty way. For instance the nature/culture paradigm, most of the larger works in the exhibition express some conflict with this. How do you see it appearing in the show?

AdC: For a long time I have been interested in how we use models from nature to confirm our humanness - be it in the form of morality parables such as Aesop’s tales or in primate research such as that undertaken by Jane Goodall.

Seeking an understanding of our humanness through comparisons to the natural world can be a problem when our perception of nature is either fetishised and overly romanticized, or we seek to answer questions that are in large part cultural – such as what it is to be a citizen, to be a family, or to be female.

At the same time we must also recognize that we are natural organisms. In our Western tradition of thought, we have coded women as Nature and men as Culture, paired nature with the authentic and culture with the fake.



In Earthseed I have tried to mix these codings up. Daffnie (above) still refers to the Greek image of a woman turned into a tree but she is more Top Model culture than she is passive nature in her unnatural posing and nylon frock.



The Crushed Petal series (above) was a direct response to a recent comment on National Radio describing young men as genetically coded for violence. It interested me that this was now a common assertion when not so long ago we would have used a socio/political/economic rationale.

Ideas associated with the nature/culture paradigm are often used in conjunction with the politics of difference. I find them useful for discussing gender but I am equally interested in the politics of the human/animal divide.



Brown Bird (above) where the woman is on her back and hosting a group of small birds could be interpreted as a nest affirming biological function, or it could be read as a reversal of the human animal hierarchy.

MNG: You mentioned you had been looking at Surrealism. What interested you about that?

AdC: Recently I was in Germany, and I saw a show of Surrealist art from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch collection. The work was very gutsy and had none of the tweeness we often associate with Surrealism.

The works were dark and brooding, and when seen in the context of Berlin seemed highly political. The work combined a beauty and ugliness to create what was referred to by Surrealists as a “convulsive beauty”. I was interested in replicating this unease in Earthseed.

MNG: Your work often explores - as a subtext rather than overtly - notions of femininity and gender. In this exhibition the female figures actively resist stereotyping, they are hairy or flocked or lactating or bald where as the male figures are damaged as if they've been in a bad car accident or a fight. What was your thinking around this?

AdC:Having watched the art world for so many years it’s very clearly a male dominated arena. I have always wondered to what extent this is due to culture and what extent to nature. I don’t think there is a clear answer but I have always resented the gender disparity.

I think this is why I have a tendency to make my male figures vulnerable in some way: damaged, stupid or gormless. This is just another way of undoing stereotypical representations of men. After all, gender stereotypes have been as problematic for men as they have for women.

Subverting or amplifying these stereotypes are just another way of questioning the stability of what we have come to know as correct or Natural.



European Primitive with Jimmy Choo (above) is an African fertility symbol - an overt representation of female as Nature – pregnant belly, large breasts and even a piglet on her head, but she is dressed in Jimmy Choo shoes.

She is a modern day representation of femininity: flocked and hairy all over, and teetering in her fabulous shoes.

MNG: The works are all made from Polystyrene, which is quite the material of the moment. Peter Robinson's work for the Walters Prize was Polystyrene and it's generally been cropping up as a material of interest to artists. Why did you decide to use it?

AdC: I started using Polystyrene as a material when I found a few huge slabs washed up on the beach after a storm. It’s a dreadful material, toxic and inert but I can’t help but love it. It’s cheap and yet it lasts forever. It can be carved and painted. It’s brittle but tough.

Coming from a sculptural background I can’t help but enjoy the irony of approaching the material as you would marble - you select your block, draw it out and then carve into it. The way I use the Polystyrene is closer to polychrome sculpture - painted wooden sculpture often used as altarpieces.

I can understand why it’s popular. It’s a kind of miracle material of our age; it does everything from building houses to holding water and it’s very easy to get hold of. Unfortunately it’s not biodegradable which means my sculptures will be around forever.

Working with polystyrene has been useful in my work as a means of adding a “not-of-nature-ness” to the work. The concept of woman as Nature, seen in classical images such as Daphne, is nicely undone when constructed in a “human-made” material.

MNG: Do you want to say something about contemporary sculpture and where you see your work fitting?

AdC: In a recent edition of The Reading Room, Natasha Conland coined the term Transcendental Pop to describe a current interest in art that alluded to a type of visual mysticism, be it cynical or otherwise. I think my work fits nicely under this heading along with artists such as David Altmejd and Francis Upritchard.

There is also the problem of sculptural figuration which I find an interesting challenge. It’s really hard to carve out new territory when you are making figures and not be too corny. I really like the work of some one like Rebecca Warren who is using quite traditional materials and methods to create something new.

MNG: Earthseed is a great title. What's the reference there?

AdC: The title comes from an Octavia Butler science-fiction novel that tells the story of Olamina. Living in a dystopian world Olamina suffers from what is defined as hyper-empathy, a disease which causes her to share pain with all other living creatures.

I like the way good science-fiction uses an in depth understanding of contemporary life to construct fictional worlds.

MNG: The exhibition also demonstrates your skill with materials. There's taxidermy which you did yourself, the carved polystyrene, the mirror stand etc. And the exhibition is a clear move away from wool just when it looked like you might settle there awhile. What was your thinking about this?

AdC: Materials present themselves and I use them. They all say something about the site in which I live and work; in a big city you wouldn’t find the same range of dead birds on a single walk around the block!

When I lived in Auckland I scavenged materials from industrial sites and when I moved to Whanganui I shifted to op shops and garage sales. This was how I came to use wool and make carpets and felts. Wool is a wonderful material to use but I was looking for away to extend my sculptural interests in figuration. I made felt figures but I found it difficult to convey more than a certain kind of ironic humor.

Low Lifes and the Child-Jarvis connection

Madeleine Child and Philip Jarvis are two artists whose primary medium is ceramics. They are also a couple who have worked together consistently since their days at art school in Camden, London.

In November 2009 they controversially won the Portage Ceramic Award with work that wasn't completely ceramic - it included foam and rubber, wire and paint. Their latest exhibition, Lower Life Forms, carries on this new stream of work and its interest in materials.

When Philip was in Wellington installing Lower Life Forms he talked about the naturalness of using the packing materials for ceramics - the foam blocks and layers - as material for the work, and the way the two materials seem to have an existing affinity.

Lower Life Forms is full of colour and texture. The wall works, the Vegetable Sheep (above), layer up ceramics in the manner of the plant after which they are named and inspired. And the Doodads and Doodahs (below) recreate a kind of rockpool with the shapes and colours of coral.



Click here to read Mark Amery's review of the exhibition.

Random Dictates and the art of the backyard

Andy Irving's recent show at the gallery Random Dictates subtly rearranged the gallery space. One of the works acted as a space divider cutting the space in half.

It hinted at something we couldn't quite put our finger on. When he came in last week he described the exhibition as a backyard installation - art from the backyard, with interior touches too.



In fact he recreated the aesthetic of the home-handy person complete with saw horse, fencing, debris, as well home renovations gone wrong - the air bubbles that blew out the wall, and the painting that seems about to fall off...



There's the impression of an industrial aesthetic at work but hand-done.

Sam Mitchell's Secrets

We asked Sam Mitchell this week about her work in Rulers. She talked about her favourite painting subjects and other topics...

MNG: In your new series of work in Rulers you have a mixture of contemporary and historic subject matter. How do you choose your subjects? What interests you about particular subjects?

SM: The choice of subject matter for my works comes from spending hours in libraries and secondhand bookstores, finding images that stick in my mind. The image of Abe Lincoln for example, his face in most photographs is unsettling and graphically interesting, with all his creases, and a splattering of facial hair. He is unusual looking unkempt, bedraggled and disheveled.

The images selected tie in with reoccurring themes in my works - my interest in 'place of origin', being separated from a sense of place, and the idea of an internal narrative.

MNG: Often you make similar images of your subjects, but load them with different "tatoos"? What's your thinking there?

SM: By using tattoos in my work (historically used by tribal nations as identification of place, tribe, family - a skin record/passport of who you were) I create falsehoods mixed in with little bits of truths. Personal, cultural, and historical details provided by the tatoos create the internal narrative of my chosen subject and leave the viewer with a mixed history of a real person.

MNG: Everyone marvels at the skill of the arcylic on perspex works (example pictured above) - of working from back-to-front? What do you like about this technique and media?

SM: The technique of reverse painting is not a new one (Warwick Brown told me so). I enjoy the finished plastic result - you don't actually see what you are painting on to the perspex until you turn it over. So it is not instant like usual ways of painting. The first marks are the last marks - they are not the building up of layers as with a traditional oil painting. My process is more like printmaking - the use of line then the after thought of colour and tone to describe the form.

MNG: Can you say something about your collaboration with Gavin Hurley? (See images in previous post below).

SM: This is a very easy process....Gavin provides me with a collage and I have the freedom usually unedited to add to it.

We work so differently, Gavin is tidy and organised, and his work reflects this sense of order. So I am honored to be able to disrupt the order and add some twisted sense of chaos to his so perfectly cut and neat collages.

Our collaborations I think work really well. The collage is complete in as far as Gavin is concerned when he hands it over to me. He never really knows what the original work will come back looking like, and I have no preconceived idea of what I will add to the work. So it really is a surprise to us both when the collaborative work is revealed.

Rulers

Sam Mitchell and Gavin Hurley are currently showing at the gallery in their exhibition Rulers. Sam and Gavin were at art school together and have continued their association with some collaborative works (pictured: Nobody 2009 top, JFK Junior 2009 bottom).

History Painting

Victor Berezovsky's paintings bear the marks of undercutting, carving, underpainting, and chiselling. The artist as archeologist digs into their surfaces to uncover their hidden layers, and create organic histories.

The surface of the paintings record this process and also respond to it.

Victor Berezovsky's "Splinter"

Mary Newton Gallery recently talked to Victor Berezovsky about his latest work in Splinter. The exhibition comprises nine paintings on marine hoop pine that are painted, carved into, chiselled, cut, and drilled.

MNG: Your work used to be quite figurative but has slowly become more abstract. What interests you about abstraction?

VB: Yes it’s true that on the face of it my work has become more “abstract”. However I would say that my position has always been one of abstracting rather than heading towards the abstract. For me the term abstract is an absolute and near impossible position.

Ilam taught in a modernist tradition. Therefore underpinning all of my work are formal and plastic considerations. However in relationship to this are ‘figurative’ possibilities or dialogues. Over the years I have processed and abstracted from life. This process of drawing in and out has been cyclic.

These days the way I draw in new information has become more subtle and vague. Currently I need less concrete stimulus for the works to develop. In this sense the works are more abstract. Also I think it is easier for viewers of my current work to place the work as abstract as it definitely overlaps with visual language previously used or assigned to abstraction.

I would hope however that viewers review my current work in light of what has gone before it. It is the ability of this current work to echo and resonate with this past that interests me.



MNG: Your previous series, Dacha, incorporated drilled holes in patterns and added playful elements to the surface. This new work has a lot of cutting, drilling, chiselling and general attacking of the surfaces. The chiselling and chipping away of the wood lends texture as well as a painterly aspect to the process - is this your intent or what was your intention?

VB: When I first started the wood paintings for Dacha I initially set out to respond to the grain of the wood as it was pretty beautiful. The marks also reminded me of my visceral stained sheet works done in 2000. However I quickly found the results to be contrived and constraining in developing forms.

By chance a solution was brought about by finding a box of wooden peg board toys. I spend a period of time drawing on these objects and then set about drilling up the unresolved wood stretchers in a similar fashion. They immediately set up a modernist framework against the organic markings.

I liked the idea of subverting this framework by sticking wooden pegs into it or by painting the surface. In this sense the holes became architectural anchor points from which I set about contradicting or reinforcing. Importantly the holes also gave me a tool to refresh the surface when it became too skin-like or rigid due to using acrylic paint.

In a similar fashion the cuts of the new work have partially being used as a tool to refresh the surface. Sometimes I would erase what was there and sometimes it was used to make form directly. A similar approach was used in my “Marked” series in 2003. The use of cutting or scoring was employed at different times in the history of the work. The marks became imbedded into the surface and often these marks or colours were dug out or raised to the surface latter depending on what the works needed. A friend aptly used the word “accrued” to describe how forms are made in my works. I think this is a very good word to summarize the Splinter works.

MNG: Can you say something about the imagery? It's quite hard-edged but dissolves and becomes more organic in places?

VB: As some of the titles of the works suggest, the works contain or trace a level of struggle in achieving their shape. At times I found myself lost and then suddenly a single decision brought a clear and definite surge to a conclusion. What is it that determines this final point? I would say that is no one thing determined it. Rather it was the embodiment of all the working that had gone into making the history of the work.

History is often related by certain key images or symbols. These images sit at the surface of the event though their making is often underscored by the smaller events that have unfolded beneath its surface. I suppose I wanted my work to contain this meshing and rupturing of surface and show what lay beneath it.

In terms of the shapes that make up or comprise my work I would say they are a synthesis or echoing of prior forms - that is, the more organic Grotto series and the more structural Bobble series.

MNG: And the palate? What was your thinking behind the choice of colours, this exploration of greys?

VB: I usually work in high key colours when starting a work. However in the end I slowly introduced greys to subdue the palate and isolate areas of colour. I suppose in some ways the grey conveys a slightly industrial feel to the work which in turn is reinforced by the more structural forms and holes.

When I started this series I was reading about how the gulag system in the Soviet Union was used to mine regions. At some point I introduced gold and silver in response. I liked the idea of embedding these precious metals into the layers of the work and then at some point striping them back.

The scale of the problem

Gina Matchitt's large scale fast food-shaped works in Sweet'n'Sour hint at issues. She is currently living in America where super-size is the norm for everything including the people. And of course it is impossible to walk the streets of New Zealand without seeing the impact of fast-food here, to say nothing of the health problems caused by diabetes etc etc.

The two works pictured above, Large Fries and Pipi and Marinara, feature images of fresh food and the Maori boil-up, and shell fish and pasta respectively.

Gina residency last year at Centre d’Art Marnay just outside of Paris focused on food culture. She considered the relationship that cultures (in this case French) that retain their lands have with their food culture, comparing this to the Maori experience. She found that even fast food in France is reasonably high quality.

In Happy Meal pictured below, Gina weaves together these two food cultures into the shape of a Happy Meal container. The imagery of kumara blends with a vegetable dish in half the work, and a boil-up with cherries in the other half. The boil-up and kumara become fragmented by the weaving but the cherries and vegetables hold their own.

But then I have been sitting opposite the work for the past month considering its meaning, and dreaming of summer fruits... food imagery is potent overall.

Dying for a feed

Gina Matchitt's latest exhibition at the gallery Sweet'n'Sour includes some of her trademark techniques - componentry arranged in traditional Maori patterns - but also branches off in new directions.

Works like Fries Template and Cheese Royale take the shape of flattened fast food packages. Fries Template (pictured above) weaves together pasta labels and images of cherries, shell fish, and Maori potatoes using a template for a fries package as its title suggests.

It brings together these ingredients in a metaphor for cooking itself. But the overall impression is of a shroud - a reminder of the double-edged sword that eating has become.

Cheese Royale on the other hand (pictured below) engages with magazine food imagery. There's fancy French cheeses and salami and terrines woven together with images of the boil-up - not often seen in Vogue entertaining.

Sealed in a bell jar

Areta Wilkinson's Poi Girl series features silhouettes of the artist - notionally brooches - presented in bell jars. Poi Girl VIII (pictured above) sees Areta in profile tending a campfire. The metaphor of the campfire has appeared in a number of works, and her latest exhibition Waka Huia features the one pictured below as a brooch.

Called Areta's ahi kaa this work references the Maori metaphor of ahi kaa or keeping the home fires burning, the cultural fires fed, and the ancestral lands cared for.

Poi Girl VIII see Areta's literally tending the ahi kaa - maintaining and acknowledging her Ngai Tahu ancestry, but also her artistic heritage as a jeweller.

"I am telling you the things of old and smoking while I talk"

Included in Waka Huia is this cameo brooch work that features the head of Teone Taare Tikao (1850-1927), Areta Wilkinson's grandmother's granfather.

Around 1920 Herries Beattie interviewed Tikao about local knowledge and published the stories in "Tikao Talks: Treasures from the ancient world of the Maori" in 1939. From this we know that Tikao was taught that the world is round like a plate - flat and thick, and that the ancient songs say that the world is circular rimmed by sand, and outside and beyond this is space.

Areta explains "Poua Tikao may have understood the world as flat but by no means two dimensional - it was flat and thick and full. His world understood walking and talking flora and fauna, red sky portents, recited ancient whakapapa and karakia, interpreted dreams, understood seasons and preparations for survival, and politically advocated for Maori rangatiratanga.

He worked with poeople like Temaiharoa to prepare the world for modern Moari so his great great grandchildren could dwell in peace and security. How can I put my Poua's silhouette on a plate you ask? You may see a plate but I see a world."

Areta Wilkinson and the Contemporary Waka Huia

Areta Wilkinson is known for her exquisitely crafted jewellery. More recently she has blown out notions of jewellery as something wearable. Still under the guise of jewellery, the works have become the emblems of her own story as well as a wider narrative about contemporary Maori.

Her exhibition Waka Huia includes a gorgeous piece of colonial cabinetry - pictured above - and this acts as a contemporary (ironically) waka huia (treasure chest) and a display case. Inside are her collected stories emblemised as objects - the cowboy hat, the moa catcher, the wedding ring to name a few examples.

Interventions at Freyberg Pool

Victor Berezovsky's Portal intervention can now be seen on the facade of the Freyberg Pool in Wellington (pictured above). And what a journey to get it there!

Portal draws on the simplicity of the building’s design. It takes a key design element – the portal windows in the façade – and reactivates them to ensure the viewer reconsiders this aspect of the building’s design.



Portal is a temporary installation intended to complement and highlight the lines of the Freyberg building design - still fresh in the twenty-first century. But it also draws attention to the many signs, renovations and commercial add-ons that have marred its facade for some years.

Lonnie Hutchinson in silhouette

Lonnie Hutchinson's Can you see what I see opened this week at the gallery. The show get its title from one of the show's key works (pictured above with visiting celeb, Carmen).

The work, made from 20mm thick acrylic, seems to cross over into some new ground. We recognise Lonnie's language - the black and white, the silhouette - but here it's has become a screen reminiscent of Islamic architecture. It's a framed view into or out of a window that obscures and reveals...

... and Carmen was the perfect person to show this off.

Gary Freemantle and mud

Gary's new show Mud Monster literally uses mud as its primary medium. Gary started experimenting with mud in 2003 when it turned up on his doorstep after a flood in the town where he lived.

He started with landscapes (see below) but this new work deals with the figure, and includes a series of portraits that seems to disintegrate or fade out of the picture right before your eyes.

Looking for health

A visitor to the gallery over the weekend reminded me that Megan Campbell's latest work explores human notions of imperfection. Her paintings are full of figures looking for health - physical and mental - and ideas that will make them 'happy'.

In some paintings they look in places where nothing satisfactory is to be found - the past, the bottle - and in others parks, gardens, and domestic settings provide 'comfort'.

Nature and the natural world are important characters and backdrops in this nebulous search.

Megan Campbell and the art of breathing deeply

Megan Campbell's exhibition Health & Religion includes some intriguing images associated with obsolete health practices. The woman above is using a fifties asthma inhaler, but who knows what the men in black are up to...

Art - as in photography

Bruce Connew has made his name in New Zealand as a documentary photographer with socio-political interests. His new work shifts away from this arena to a more ambiguous, less factual proposition. We asked Bruce about this shift.

MNG: You're well known as a certain type of photographer. But your latest work in the exhibitions I Saw You (see image from this series above) and I Must Behave examine image- making and photography as well as presenting a 'subject'. What has prompted this new work?

BC: I've always seen myself, in rare and brief moments of clarity, as a social/political realist documentary photographer... this new work, I Must Behave, is no different, it has merely grown out of what has come before. I Saw You uses a different technique it might be argued, to what I've previously indulged in certainly, but it is about surveillance, and that's social/political. I Must Behave is about behaviour and social control, although I must accept not obviously so, but again it is social/political. The technique applied is much the same as I've ever used, although I made a conscious decision half-way through 2007 to have my 35mm frame vertical as much as possible when I photographed, and with a prime lens slightly wider than my perennially regular, normal lens. As well, I made a point often not to look through the viewfinder at what I was choosing to photograph. I have used these techniques before with other projects, but not with the same dedication of purpose as I did with the latter part of collecting imagery for I Must Behave.

What has prompted this shift in approach? A desire to come in at subject that correspond with my lines of thought and concerns, at a somewhat different trajectory. Why? I must admit, I haven't spent much time thinking about it. I can resurrect particular moments: for example, I became aware near the end of seven years photographing Indian-Fijian sugar cane cutters for Stopover, periodically living closely with them, that I was beginning to consider moving my ideas into new territory, but was unsure just how that vague impulse might proceed. I Saw You overlapped the tail end of Stopover, and while the approach changed dramatically, it remained a microcosmic look at the broad notion of surveillance, an approach not uncommon in my previous work. Stopover, for instance, while focusing on Indian-Fijian sugar cane cutters, a tiny slice of humanity, is about migration - the hypotheosis that we're forever migrants, only sometimes we're in a position of stopover. Beyond the pale is my whimsical conviction that underground coal miners could represent the nature, not only of the New Zealand personality, but also of a much wider humanity. In the way it was photographed, and then put together as a body of work, it offered threads common across borders: comradeship, hard work, shared danger, intimacy, sexuality, aloneness, loneliness and others. Mostly, thus far, it seems only to have been considered as a body of work representing underground coal miners.

So, I produce work in a realist documentary manner that can be read first, if you like, for its literal, narrative line ... of course, there are always, always, always further layers, sub-texts within individual images, within sequences of images in a body of work, and within a series as a whole. I have never seen it as my responsibility to spell those out. I can discuss process and idea, but meaning, while I have mine, must be in the mind of the viewer.

MNG: Visitors to the exhibition have tried to relate the title to the works quite literally... but it's not a literal relationship, right? As your byline says, it's a sideways glance at behaviour. Anything you want to say about that?

Yes, I'm aware of that. Anyone who sees the work, without exception, has asked at least once about where a particular image was taken. I'm happy to explain, but it isn't a clue to the image and its meanings, or indeed a clue to the work as a whole, which is why there is no captioning information whatsoever in the book.

You know, at a late stage in the book's production, while it was at the printers, I weakened for a moment and considered including an explanatory line or two ... fortunately, a good friend, when it was put before him for a speedy response, said the following:

"I don't think you need this piece of text? Or rather, what it says does not seem to me to cover the broad effect of your project, which for me rests on doubt, uncertainty, taboos, proscribed or hidden practices, a hint of menace and of apocalypse either now or just averted or soon to come - and which gives the viewer a certain not wholly pleasant frisson as to what 'human nature' might really involve - by comparison with which the sentence you offer seems a bit too literal and limiting, prosaic even?"

That cleared the thought pretty quickly!

With I Must Behave, I have done away with a literal, narrative layer (beyond a layered title, and, in the book, a layered sub-title too), which may perplex some viewers given the history of my work, but to perplex is not my goal. It's just that this work, rather than a microcosmic approach, has been collected from 10 different countries over three years, a broad physical sweep attached to the broad concept of behaviour and control, something of a monumental topic, and, of course, one that resists a single definition. As well, I'm conscious to eschew moral judgement, or, for that matter, use the work to coach, rather it is a tone, a feel, even an inkling that I hope viewers stroll away with. Behaviour and control has been dealt with in many different ways ... this is mine.

MNG: Do you imagine that you will continue to do projects like Stopover?

While I wait for I Must Behave to arrive from its fabulous Italian printers, I'm working through ideas for the next project, and while a clear picture is yet to emerge, I figure it will not be like Stopover, in a way that nothing before was like Stopover.

I approach the process for each project with an open mind, although that may only now be evident as the differences in process from earlier work are more sharply defined.

As well, I Saw You and I Must Behave are the first two in a series of three projects each exploring a particular social/political theme, so I expect the third to run it's own path, much as the first two.

The Censored 2008 triptych, another recent tangent, developed as I collected work in China for I Must Behave .. I enjoy the overlap of ideas and processes, and, I must say, I'm gratified when the likes of lofty, literary magazine Granta see sufficient value in the work to publish it. (Granta, Spring 2009, issue #105, Lost and Found)

MNG: Mark Amery suggests in his review of I Must Behave that you were subverting your own photographic practice. I wasn't sure I agreed, but perhaps you were?

BC: Certainly, my motivation for I Must Behave, and I Saw You, did not begin with an art notion to subvert my earlier work. My photographic practice continues to grow, perhaps with an occasional, kooky outgrowth. When I retrace my steps to end up at my abbreviated, formal art education period, before my first social/political documentary project in 1976 (on a disheveled Aboriginal community in north-west Australia, the fall-out from 1967, when Aborigines were made Australian citizens, and, incredibly, first gained the right to vote), if ever there was a foggy effort to undermine myself, it was probably then with my deduction that I shouldn't be anything other than a photojournalist. I was aware I wanted to work towards social/political documentary, but considered this single option, which, as I look at it now, was an unlikely fit ... I had years of difficulty with magazines and photo agencies. I had my agenda and they had theirs, and our infrequent, although sometimes lengthy, alliances were a blinding headache to all who were implicated. It took me years to work that one out. I was never a photojournalist, but I tried very hard to be one because I imagined that was my destiny. I didn't even look like one! So, I suppose, early on, I undermined my own instincts. Now, I'm right on track.

Art memories

Gordon Crook and I were photographing the work above in his garden recently in preparation for his exhibition Smoke. Afterwards he wrote to say he had remembered where the image 'came' from:



"Due to the enormous amount of research reading I did on previous shows, I wanted to pitch in straightaway and work spontaneously, ignoring the chore of research. I bought sketchbooks and let the images flow. So appeared the odd drawing of 'a man smoking a pipe' (above) though there was no pipe to be seen, and was that actually smoke issuing from his mouth? The drawing fascinating me, and I decided to concentrate on this compelling puzzle. It soon reminded me of an uncle I sometimes visited. He was shell-shocked during the Great War and lived with my grandfather and other uncles and Aunt Mabel. I would sit at the tea table with Mother and the others. Shell-shocked Ben (see painting below) would take a plug of navy tobacco from his pocket and pare shavings of it with a penknife into his pipe. After a few well-focused puffs a plume of foul-smelling smoke would hit the blackened ceiling. His face a picture of contentment.



I wanted to use this theme of smoke and smoking. But to bby-pass the cultural history - its film star charm and the ad fads of the thirties, the settlers introducing this terrible addiction to Maori, and so on. However I was no nearer to solving the mystery of that corkscrew emanation- what it might mean. In a sudden flash I recalled a small tapestry I had woven that was hung in the library at Victoria University. A similar head ans similar emanation. I did not know then what it was - but now I do - it is the 'breath of life'.

The form of the head - the why if it - eluded me. I made a Marquette of it for a garden sculpture thinking it could be enlarged like a stone mason's graveyard angel or to my aspiration of a Rodin bronze... Mary-Jane was taking photos of it when the sun shone straight through his nostril. Ureaka! It was Sunny Jim. Rag doll mascot of the cereal called FORCE given to me for breakfast when I was a child. I saved the packet tops and sent them away and back came Sunny Jim. He has rested unbeknown to me in my mind ever since - long ago wandering along with another Sunny Jim I acquired when I was thirty-six.

He was part of me associated with my uncle Cecil Aldin from whom, said my mother, I had inherited my artistic talent... He made toys for Liberty's with my father, and painted popular 'horse and hounds' pictures for many a country pub, the huntsmen in the red jacket like Sunny Jim.

High o'er the fence leaps Sunny Jim
Force is the food that raises him.

Whatever you say, wherever you've been
You can't beat the cereal, that raised Sunny Jim."

Photography is the new painting

A client visited the gallery recently to look at I Must Behave by Bruce Connew. She surprised me with a question about the validity of photography as an art form... "It is so reproducible." I was stunned - I didn't have a comeback. But what I should have said was "Everything is reproducible in the 21st century, but that certainly doesn't preclude the creation of great images in any media." And of course we all take photographs, but the real skill, the art, is in the production of the image as object - the texture, the quality of the image on the paper. This is the acid test - the translation from the screen to the wall.

And of course photography has its own tricks and knowledge and accidents and wonder that distinguish it from other media without detracting from its appeal. It can reference painting, it can reference its own traditions and practitioners - like any art form it does wherever it wants. I mean look at the image above by Bruce Connew. Gorgeous.

Behaving

Bruce Connew's exhibition I Must Behave includes 14 framed photographs. The I Must Behave series is made up of 90 images. Featured here are two images from the series not included in the exhibition.



I Must Behave takes a sideways look at behaviour. It examines the notion that wherever we are, we are controlled by social, cultural, and political forces.

Censored

Bruce Connew's new exhibition I Must Behave includes his work Censored, recently a finalist in the Waikato Art Awards. Censored is undoubtedly a major work by one of New Zealand's foremost photographers. It will also be published in the May issue of Granta.

Here's what Bruce says about it:
"While in Zhongshan, China, during May 2008, I bought a copy of National Geographic magazine's May 2008, pre-Olympic Games, special issue on China. The magazine was plastic sealed. I cut it open back at my hotel. I removed the plastic, and leisurely thumbed my way through the fresh magazine, reaching page 46, and couldn't help but notice two-and-a-bit lines on the left-hand page excised with heavy black ink. Ah, censored, I deduced, and just 80-odd days out from the Olympic Games. Angled against the light, I could read the excised words, " . . . the Japanese invasion to the Cultural Revolution to the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989." Oh dear, that was curiously provocative of National Geographic. I thumbed some more. I came to a page that felt thicker than the others, and figured it was a three-page fold-out; but no, it was a double-page spread that had been glued together. Astonishing - this magazine was turning out to be a collector's item.

I moved along. Two more double-page spreads glued together. I must have spent an hour carefully prising them apart. They had been glued around the bright, red-ink border of each double-page, as if the border had been made for the task, and then the censor had pressed his/her glue stick in a full-page, neatly-formed, marvellously symbolic, diagonal cross that, when prised apart, tore at the printer's ink, immortalising the censor's work, and a government's meaning. This is when I discovered National Geographic had been truly, and improbably, confrontational. Each glued double-page spread dealt with a sensitive, political issue, using, mostly, art works by Chinese artist, some of which had been previously banned."