Summer on the Lorne

Summer Group Show
Antoinette Godkin
2 December 2009 – 31 January 2010

Nine artists connected to the Antoinette Godkin gallery present old and new work to be perused over the Christmas holidays. No prints or photography, mainly abstract paintings and drawing.

While the Godkin regulars here do provide excellent contributions, there are few surprises. Andre Hemer has a characteristic predominantly yellow and red canvas laden with vigorous computer-stored gestures and negative slashes, while Miranda Parkes has one of her large, striped, voluminous canvases - plus two small paintings with glued on paint fragments. Though they have been shown before, Esther Leigh has some superbly elegant milky/pink works of translucent film and ink on reflective mirror.

The startling revelations (for me) come from paintings, such as the predominantly blue, shimmering abstraction by Sue Novell, based on a landscape photograph processed digitally. It generates open abstract forms packed with wiggling wormlike strokes. These teeming pockets of energy seem connected to Pat Hanly’s ‘Molecular’ paintings of the seventies inspired by Blake, Huxley and lysergic acid.

Andy Tolhurst has two wonderfully pristine vinyl ‘paintings’ as well, crisp geometric compositions related to Matt Mulligan or Peter Halley. One is based on a squashed Lion Beer label found on the footpath. Its red, grey, black, white and yellow colours have been applied to a squared-off Gordon Walters-like ‘koru’ structure with the panel’s vertical proportions divided into thirds and then sixths. The other work is an elegant arrangement of carefully selected squared signs taken off Japanese noodle packets and placed onto a silvery field.

James R. Ford presents four mono-coloured rectangular jigsaws, under glass with thick black frames. They use colour from colour printing (demonstrating what is termed ‘subtractive’ for the mixing of absorbed light) to reference the three primaries (cyan, magenta and yellow) and the result of their mixing (black). There is a strange humour implied by the interlocking jigsaw pieces because these separate colour units would work only by juxtaposition. This would inevitably result in grey (not the commonly expected secondary hues that come from overlaying and transparency). Perversely, the proportions are those of landscape painting (a different principle again from mixing light ['additive' from reflected colour] and printing with separated primaries).

Ford’s use of jigsaw modules has links with the drawings of Carol Fletcher who repeats tracings of details from discarded wrappers or her own drawings, to construct gridded rectangles with rows of repeated units. These she covers with liquid wax.

Whilst there is a certain droll humour in making faint pencil drawings out of rubbish, that reference industrial mechanization and artists like Warhol, the stacked images seem too understated to me, and not obsessive enough. They need to be more extreme, to be in their thousands, not just under a hundred.

Matthew Dowman makes more convincing works with tone rather than colour in my view, especially with his complicated swirling nets of stencilled and airbrushed black and white lines, overlaid with toothbrush-flicked fine mists. They create considerable impact with their different points of density and clashing directional alignments; so that whilst almost chaotic, they still retain order and invite mental immersion.

Helen Calder’s painting/sculpture of a peeled-off, blue, acrylic/enamel hide hanging off a short rail doesn’t have the impact of the works in her recent City Art Rooms show. The pleasure found in her painting is in the striated, pitted textures of the surface and its edges, so when that skin is repeatedly folded over those chances for scrutiny disappear. A wide fleece then becomes a narrow towel or floppy shower mat in a hotel bathroom, and while such humour about painting’s social after-effects might be intended, I suspect not. The ambiguous, possibly utilitarian function of the portable and very rubbery ‘painta-derm’ in an architectural setting is not really anticipated as a question.

Images of works by Andre Hemer, Sue Novell, Andy Tolhurst (2), Matthew Dowman (2), and Helen Calder alongside James R.Ford. In descending order.

Gorman and Leigh

Esther Leigh & Kristy Gorman: Into the wilderness
Snowwhite, UNITEC
17 August – 11 September 2009

This double show of two teaching staff at UNITEC is an odd presentation in the way it displays studio research. Somehow the pairing doesn’t gel - even though both artists are known for tendencies at times ‘minimal.’

Esther Leigh uses collage here to develop notions explored elsewhere in her well-known ‘foggy’ images of papier mâché ‘landforms’ photographed through frosted glass. She has photographed her props (polystyrene this time I think) on a glossy floor. They look like icebergs or chunks of packed snow. She has then cut these photographs into strips and restuck the eleven horizontal bands on to paper with Sellotape. These then were photocopied to make four drawings.

The wrinkles, folds and small bubbles of the slightly dark Sellotape add an icelike element to the floor under the props, while the parallel bands bring in a reference to the glossy gallery floorboards. It’s a clever idea where the images seem like the ice, to be decaying. Leigh’s work is worth a trip to Snowwhite to see.

Kristy Gorman is known for her understated ‘paintings’ of paper perforated with tiny holes – often circles of radiating lines or concentric patterns. Here she shows works on watercolour paper: two linear green ink drawings of angular, textured, overlapping shards and three studies with watercolour wash. Two delicate pink works are of vague torsos or portions of a body. The work seems too insubstantial and unresolved to bother presenting in a gallery.

Yet there is one treat within what is in essence a half-hearted display - a small Suprematist watercolour of nine overlapping grey bands of different lengths, widths and angles. It is like a tiny Malevich made by Michael Harrison and is unnervingly nuanced and precise. This one work by Gorman generates real energy and excitement. Here she is not doodling absentmindedly but actually controlling the compositional dynamic of her forms. With a wonderful result.

The two images above are from Esther Leigh's Idle Fleet # 1 & 3 , 2009, sellotape and ink on paper

Godkin on Lorne

Four artists
Antoinette Godkin, Level 1, 28 Lorne St.
3 June - 4 July 2009

Antoinette Godkin, in her comparatively exhibiting new space in Lorne St, presents four slightly disparate artists: Ana Horomia, Sue Novell, Esther Leigh and David Morrison.

Ana Horomia’s work is positioned in a corner near the entrance to the gallery. Hundreds of identical Vinyl lozenges (rectangles with curved corners) are arranged in two bands that descend to meet in the central crease. Each band is five lozenges thick and though they are white on the outside, they are painted in four types of fluorescent colour underneath. Each unit is held in space by a Perspex stem so that the tinted lolly colour glows on the white wall, to be seen only indirectly, reflected.

I am not sure about the inverted v-formation in the corner. It seems too understated, and might work better as a block with horizontal bands in the middle of a whole wall. It lacks impact that is memorable.

Sue Novell shows four canvases. Two have thinly painted coloured organic shapes evenly positioned throughout on white fields. They look vaguely landscapey. A third is of fragmented lines and dots - and is more interesting because it is not so regular but denser nearer the top right-hand side. It has a dynamic that creates an intriguing visual tension. Novell’s fourth work mixes line with translucent blobby shape. The interwoven formations have a complexity that holds your interest.

Esther Leigh is the most experienced artist here by far, and it shows. Her Glade and Wade images of papier maché forms and feather boas photographed through sand-blasted glass are remarkably evocative, suggesting underwater ruins or foggy cliff-forms. There are also 2003 works where she is using mirror paint and red ink with repeated layers of cut-through film matt to create abstract pink doorways floating in a beautiful milky haze.

Leigh knows how to make haunting images by controlling light on reflected surface. David Morrison’s square oil paintings have similar concerns and are more minimal compositionally, but somehow the surfaces and scale seem inappropriate. The modulated tones and muted colours end up looking very ordinary. The problem is oil paint is too coarse a medium for his interests. Photographic digital techniques might be more successful.

Overall this is not a memorable show, though Leigh is the star with work that carries on from what she exhibited at Roger Williams a couple of years ago. Her Glade and Wade images are well worth a trip down to Lorne Street.