Art seen: Bold constructions with deeper messages

James Dignan takes a look at the latest exhibitions around Dunedin.

"New work", Morgan Jones (Monumental Gallery)

Monumental Gallery is hosting a collection of large wooden constructions by Morgan Jones.

Working at the borders of assemblage and architectural study, Jones' structures are art objects in their own right, yet many also simultaneously work as potential maquettes for larger installations.

With a limited bold palette of red, white, and black, the artist has produced 14 edifices which speak of forced transit, involuntary travel to some unknown destination.

The two threads which intersect in many of these works are the artist's own travel from Britain to a new life in New Zealand, and a haunting of the Holocaust, with its forced migration of millions to a less fortunate destination.

The works can be divided into two series by means of their palette - solid black or white, and black on red.

Text plays an important role in both series, in the letters of the works' titles in the angular black on red abstracts, and in some semi-cryptic clue to the works' meanings in the case of the monochromatic pieces.

Probably the most impressive of the works is a large, handless clock face in white on a white background, whose text speaks of infinity.

The clock seems stopped by the futility of measuring the endlessness of time.

"Five new works", Martin Thompson (Brett McDowell Gallery)

Martin Thompson is gaining a reputation for his painstaking mathematical grids.

The pieces, constructed on firm numerical principles, are laboriously coloured using felt pen, the resulting images spreading in patterns reminiscent of Sierpinski's fractal structures.

The grids form ghost echoes, containing reduced replicas of themselves repeating down to the limits which the paper's squares will allow.

Thompson's work falls within the bounds of outsider art - far from representational or abstract mainstreams, and with a quality indicative of Thompson's unusual mental skills.

The patterns are hand-coloured, then repeatedly cut and layered in a manner which can only be described as obsessive, the resulting work showing the traces of the hours spent over each.

The works share properties with ancient Persian tile designs - unsurprisingly, since these too were firmly founded on absolute numeric rigour.

This similarity is enhanced by the use of bright turquoise for two of the pieces, a colour prevalent in early Islamic art.

In his most recent work, Thompson has made a significant breakthrough, with an astonishingly intricate piece in deep blue, its structure producing the implication of diagonals, criss-crossing like some rayonist computer readout.

This work hints that Thompson may well be about to travel down even more intriguing mathematical pathways.

"New work", Helen Badcock (Printmakers Studio)

At Printmakers Studio, Helen Badcock is displaying a series of life drawing studies.

The pieces form three distinct groups, with half being works in oil pastel and graphite, and most of the remainder being charcoal works, all of these on paper.

Along with these two groups are two pieces in oil on board.

In the charcoal works, fine line has been left as a basis upon which specific details of the model have been moulded with more intensity in the charcoal.

The medium has been well-used, and the artist has allowed empty space within the framed area to balance the more heavily worked areas of the paper's surface.

It is the oil pastels, however, which show the artist's abilities - and also her influences - most clearly.

The artist has made good use of earth tones, and has employed deliberate faint distortion of features (or absence of facial features in some cases) to emphasise certain aspects of the images.

In this, and in the unflattering yet truthful line and contour of the models, there is a nod to a synthesis of antecedents ranging from the Nabis and North German expressionists to Schiele and Bacon.

The resulting works are both impressive and satisfying.