What do a jeweller, painter, sculptor and photographer have in common? Dunedin Public Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammond explains to Rebecca Fox.
Dunedin is the answer.
All four artists practising their diverse arts in our southern city are the feature of a new exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.‘‘Ridiculous Sublime'' focuses on four contemporary artists from Dunedin.
DPAG curator Lucy Hammond said the gallery was committed to contemporary art in Dunedin and supporting artists in the community.
As part of that it had committed to holding exhibitions every two years featuring Dunedin artists; this exhibition is the second.‘‘To see what is happening in the region right now and to see what might come.''While the gallery often brought international and national artists to Dunedin, it was also important for it to showcase city artists' creative endeavours.
It gives Hammond a rare opportunity to cast her eye over the wide-ranging art practices in the region to discover what stands out.
She needed to find artists whose recent work had the ‘‘ability to talk together in a gallery in an interesting way''.‘‘It's important we can acknowledge and celebrate artists at a great place in their practice and career and are from here,'' Hammond said.
Four artists' work fitted that bill - painter Nick Austin, who came to the city as a Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 2012 and never left, jeweller Jane Dodd, who returned to her home town in 2009, and two Dunedin School of Art lecturers, sculptor Scott Eady and photographer Rachel H. Allan.
‘‘What I was thinking about at the time was that all four of their practices seem to have synergy. ‘‘When I was looking across the range of works being made in Dunedin there seemed to me to be something interesting happening when I looked at those four bodies of work.
‘‘They're all artists who I think have really interesting practices independently of one another. They're people that are working at a really high level or have work addressing ideas or processes or ways of making art which have particular agency right now.''
Despite the synergy, they were four very different artists with four very different practices in the show, she said.
Austin, a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University, worked across a range of media with a focus on painting and drawing. Some of his work is included in DPAG's contemporary art collection.
Not all the works were made especially for the exhibition. Some were existing works remade for the space and audience.
Eady, also an Elam graduate, specialises in large-scale sculpture, some of which is also in the DPAG collection. For this exhibition he is promising a surprise with a remade work.
‘‘I think people will really enjoy seeing it in its latest form.''
Their diverse practices were chosen for being just that, as they attracted a variety of audiences with the potential to stretch the viewer's interest, she said.
‘‘It creates different meeting points, encourages people to re-evaluate things. If they are very committed to one form, it's an opportunity to open it up a little bit.''
Dodd had recently been working with bone, shell, stone and wood, exploring the tensions between historic decorative traditions and the natural world. Allan, a Dunedin School of Art graduate and now lecturer in photography and fine arts, used her work to challenge perceptions of reality and explore the fetishisation of processes and objects.
While different, it was the meeting points between the artists that attracted Hammond.
The four bodies of work all encourage the viewer to reassess things they might see as familiar and to offer a new way of seeing things in the everyday environment.
‘‘Their distinct views reinforce how we see everyday materials, objects or spaces.''
All the artists' work would make people think about what it meant and what the artist was doing, she said.
‘‘It's a process of negotiation, which is a sign of a great work, I think.''
