For this site it’s unusual: a review of a ceramic exhibition. For this, we thank Rhondda Bosworth

Len Castle: Mountain to the sea
Lopdell House, Titirangi
13 February – 13 April 2009

Here we have a master at the top of his game. This body of work is a national taonga. It has a cohesion and substance rarely seen. For those of us looking down the barrel at old age, this thrilling work is a revelation. Len Castle is in his 85th year, and he has made most of these 61 works since 2003.

Castle’s practice is independent of throwing on the wheel or using plaster moulds. Peter Simpson, in his catalogue essay says: “His work has become increasingly sculptural as he has cut, beaten, kneaded, torn and twisted clay”.
He quotes Castle as saying “Those of us who work with clay and fire can be called alchemists, and visual poets.”

The artist Theo Schoon introduced Len Castle to the beauty of geothermal areas in the North Island in the early 1950’s. Castle has returned many times with his camera, and it is worth noting that his photographs, fascinating works in themselves, successfully elucidate his creative process.

His passion for marine and volcanic landscapes has inspired many of these forms – closely reminiscent of shells, rocks, fossils, stones, algae, lichens, cooling lumps of magma. They have an amazing verisimilitude to the real thing, but because this is art, and these are not found objects in nature, they become objects of meditation and contemplation. These artifacts, created from elements of the Earth itself, hold powerfully encoded meanings. They pulsate with colour and texture. They are tactile. One wants to touch, but the cracked surfaces are suggestive of heat.

Castle has written in ‘Touched by Fire’ (NZ Geographic #43, July-Sept 1999):

Clay and Fire are my partners. When I encounter them in nature, my response is fascination and awe. The phenomenon of cracking intrigues me, and is one of the textural expressions that I use in a number of my ceramic forms.

During my research for this review, I learned that clays are powdered rock mixed with water. They have various qualities depending on what minerals they contain, and the fineness of the particles. The glazes can be pure minerals which melt at high temperatures, leaving a glass-like coating over the clay, or mixtures of clay, flax, pigments and silica.

Len Castle began working with this medium in 1947 during his training as a science teacher, and became a full-time potter in 1962. He studied both in St Ives Cornwall with Bernard Leach, and some years later with Japanese ceramic artists. The work shows the Japanese influence still, not so much in the forms themselves which are timeless and all his own, but in their Zen-like meditative quality.

My favorite bowl (they are all magnificent and often suggestive of volcanic lakes) has a ragged fringe of clay inside its immaculate circumference. Within the bowl is the deep, rich, red glaze that Castle has used liberally in these works. “Volcanic flower” too, a singed, seamed flower, has this molten red glaze at its centre.

There is so much evocation here, and a virtuosity that is about much more than technical expertise. Many personal qualities are required to achieve at this level, including vision, talent, imagination, determination, patience, and energy. Accordingly his exiting “Inverted Volcano(es)” (2007) are a wonderful fait accompli of the artist’s imagination. For this viewer they epitomize (literally) a turning upside-down of conventional expectations.

This touring exhibition was organized by the Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery, who are to be commended - except for the inclusion of the work of 10 poets, who were invited to “respond” to the work. This is a curatorial concept that needs to be discouraged. If curators invite and include multi-disciplinary “responses”, where will it end?

Installation images courtesy of Lopdell House, Castle portrait courtesy of Chris Hoult.

Investigating info - once more

Justin Morgan: Information Recorded
Lopdell House, Titirangi
14 February -13 April 2008


Justin Morgan’s installation in the bay window of Lopdell House’s large gallery examines information and how we present it, and use it – when applied to a site like a gallery building. He is interested in how the viewer engages in ‘investigation and…interaction’ with an art work.

The show operates on two levels:

Firstly you have Morgan’s own interaction with the Lopdell House building from various sides, heights and angles, using photography (over 2000 tiny images on one small wall), computer sequencing, linear drawing on carbon paper, and found ‘readymade’ fragments.

Then you have the viewer’s interaction with Morgan’s material, trying to make sense of his display, looking though an assortment of pieces, trying to put the pertinent bits together, and speculating how they might function. The show is not about pleasing the eye – it is aesthetically indifferent – but about representation and the methods of correlation we use to deduce ‘meaning.’

Yet, like other shows I’ve recently seen here, this exhibition is very early seventies, but a type of ‘conceptual art’ based on structuralist photography - and mixed with other media. Somehow it misses the point of a building like Lopdell House in that its architectural success is not due to the sum of its parts but because of its total entity. Its appeal is as a cohesive unit, but in Morgan’s show, we get disparate pieces. He is hoping the viewer will be motivated to butt the various fragments together or overlap them, and so want to closely examine the building they are standing in.

However because his style of presentation is so deliberately bland in its functionality, the viewer is unlikely to get sparked off. They are not likely to care about analysing the information before them and how they might have used it. There is no carrot to lure them into participating, to arouse their curiosity. The show is quaint and thirty–odd years past its use-by date.

What is interesting is the show's affinities to the recent projects of David Clegg, who like Morgan is from Taranaki. Clegg's archivedestruct installations though are more social in their focus, use sound and image, are closer to situationist in flavour, and with a fascinating perversity in that he deliberately 'jams the signals' by mixing in radio broadcasts. Clegg is also pro-ocular with an aesthetic, design conscious, sensibility - combined as I've hinted, with humour. Morgan is dry, almost indifferent to his audience, and more preoccupied with his own processes and obsessions.

Joys of inversion

Gavin Hipkins: Second Empire
Lopdell House, Titirangi
14 February -13 April 2008

Recently I discussed the glassed-over and framed Hipkins show at Starkwhite but these works by that artist in the Second Empire series are quite different. They are printed into canvas and presented as a sort of painting, much as Paul Hartigan has done with his H-Types of digitally tweaked Polaroids, which were originally taken in the seventies to document New Zealand street-signage.

The eight Hipkins works at Lopdell House though are historical, line engraved book illustrations reversed into negative, and inverted. The superimposed embroidered patches are brighter in hue, and to me, not as funny or as subtle as the text based works with birds and reptiles. The patches are clearly thematic. For example, for inverted river scenes we have a canoe or leaping salmon, and for a railway vista we have a St. Andrew’s cross of monkey wrenches.

These images are bigger and so, more physical in their presence. The inversion makes you work a little harder for, as negative topsy-turvy images they are very abstract and initially chaotic. But you still get drawn in, especially with no glass. You need to study the background before examining the fabric patch.

Mostly though they are enigmatic, remaining mysterious. The inversion encourages confusion and mistaken interpretations of imagery, pushing you into tangled skeins of ambiguity. Mischievous stuff.

Three decades on

In Good Form: the Abstract Art of Roy Good 1967 - 2007, curated by Edward Hanfling
Lopdell House, Titirangi.
14 December 2007 - 10 February 2008

Ed Hanfling does the Auckland reviews for Art New Zealand, but he is also nationally known for his Ferner publications on Ian Scott, and his involvement with the Gus Fisher show ‘Vuletic and his Circle’. He obviously has a serious passion for geometric abstraction, especially that coming out of Auckland, so it makes sense that he has put together this small survey of Roy Good’s paintings.

Though a painter, Good also worked as a designer and teacher after he graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in the early sixties, and many of the paintings show a designer’s sensibility. He had exhibitions at Petar/James, New Vision and Barry Lett, amongst others. He lives in Titirangi, hence the presentation in Lopdell House.

The best work in this mini-retrospective was made in the early to mid seventies. In fact the whole show reeks of the seventies, even paintings made this millennium. Alas there is too much work here for the moderately-sized Lopdell space. The twelve best works would have made an excellent exhibition by themselves, paintings which emphasise Good’s interest in shaped canvas, are architectural in the way their contained forms interact with the surrounding room, and which downplay his interest in transparent overlapping planes.This last area of research, I think, has not been as successful as his use of 'solid' forms.

These successful works are influenced by early Mrkusich, mixed in with a bit of Kenneth Noland. Their interest lies in their avoidance of Mrkusich’s Jungian symbolism, and eschewing the square or horizontal rectangle for the stretcher: using T-shapes, or triangles or I-forms instead. The smaller works peppered throughout of spirals, Perspex boxes and linear geometric forms seem too complicated and comparatively slight.

It would be interesting to do a national survey of geometric abstraction from the seventies. In Christchurch for example, the 20/20 Vision group with John Coley, Michael Eaton (and I think Carl Sydow) had a lot in common with Good. As did others like Ray Thorburn with his modular paintings (Good has modular screenprints).

In Good Form helps focus on this fascinating period and resurrect images that might end up being long forgotten – often for sound reason, because for those of us who lived through that period many of these works do look dated. Those that don’t though – like the ones I’ve mentioned - look terrific and have a convincing presence; so a trip out to Titirangi is worth the effort. However because you need to grasp the total picture beyond what is on the Lopdell walls, buy or borrow Hanfling’s excellent scholarly catalogue. With his thorough discussion and various copious illustrations, you get a much needed background context.

More is never more

Ghost Guest Host - James Robinson
Lopdell House, Titirangi
14 December 2007 - 10 February 2008

Some artists in this country achieve a profile far beyond what their talent deserves – the result of our small undiscerning population. In my view James Robinson is one of those: an over-rated individual who recently inexplicably won a James Wallace Art Award and a residency in New York. Yet in his current show at Lopdell, though Robinson’s individual works are clichéd and cornball, overall it is a well conceived hang (better than the crowded arrangement of Roy Good works next door), with eight vertical canvas hangings, a group of much smaller paper drawings in the window alcove (see detail above), and some computer animation on a monitor. The spatial organisation is a success, but the artworks themselves are facile.

Why my antagonism to these paintings? Well his work is all body and no brains, equating thoughtless energy and abundant accumulation from frenetic obsessiveness with quality. It is an angst-ridden hybrid of Twombly, Basquiat and (perhaps) Dieter Roth, an unrelenting visual torrent of scribbled, scratched and painted marks, scrawled texts, stitches, slashes, collages, and assemblages that attempts to perpetuate the belief that because the artist is a genius all that he creates is of interest: the denser and more prolific the output the better. The process of psychic outpouring is the thing, a matter of purgative ‘soulful’ elimination that is almost bodily. The result is densely packed work that lacks air. Surfaces are there to be crammed with marks or glued on objects – to the max.

Robinson appeals to people who in the eighties would have purchased Philippa Blair (or Emily Karaka) paintings with their overloaded – but less brainless - cacophony of lines and colour. At least he limits his colour options, mainly I think because he tends to use paint as a means of drawing. He is a Basquiat addict big time – far more than what that other Robinson dauber (and vastly superior artist) - Peter – used to be.

Some artists who work in an overcooked fashion can still imbue their work with a keen sense of design and wit (like Jonathan Meese) but Robinson’s practice lacks that kind of control. But as I’ve said, he activates the Titirangi space nicely. It is a nifty piece of walk-in installation that impresses as long as you don’t get up too close to the surfaces and accidentally look at them.