Hannah Kidd is getting a lot of much-deserved attention for her impressive sculptures.
Working with used metal - often corrugated iron - Kidd creates distinctive works of great beauty and style with panache, and often with more than a trace of humour. The artist builds the sculptures by eye, rather than using a maquette or model, instilling them with personality while maintaining their physical accuracy. Kidd has sculpted many features of New Zealand rural life, as well as the occasional more exotic beast, with her near life-sized sculptures including fishermen, deer and a windswept matriarch at the clothesline.
In her latest series, Kidd tackles another Kiwi icon, the gallops. In a series of distinctively individual pieces, we see the entrants in a horse race spread across the gallery as they chase the elusive win. The works each show a strong eye for the details of the race, and also a firm and thorough grasp of the anatomy of horse, rider and the symbiotic creature that they together form.
It almost seems a pity that these works will be sold separately, such is the dynamic of the group. It is keenly to be hoped, however, that some of these pieces find homes at the courses, where they can be enjoyed by an appreciative race-going audience.
Diana Smillie has taken a plunge into the deep in her latest exhibition, ''The city beneath the sea''.
The artist has, over a series of exhibitions, explored the murky chaos of the subconscious, bringing up harsh images of psychosexual horror and depravity which are simultaneously terrifying yet beautiful. There is a deep need to see this darkness and malevolence in a way that is both cathartic for the artist and revelatory to the viewer. Smillie's exhibitions are never easy viewing; they leave a stain which, like Lady Macbeth's imagined bloodied hands, cannot be easily removed.
For the current exhibition, Smillie was inspired by a television documentary on the ''black smokers'', the sea-floor vents which pour superheated water into the depths of the ocean, creating oases of life in the blackness. To Smillie's mind, these represent the boiling undercurrents of hidden human emotion, and simultaneously bring to mind the dark satanic mills of 19th-century industrialism.
Her images, alternating between a sickly luminous green and a glaring neon red, show scenes of this dark psychic turbulence populated by anima and animus as animal: the horse- and cat-headed women, the cowed masculine bull. The canvas is often stressed or warped, to give the dark images yet more imbalance as the artist plumbs the depths of the soul.
Light plays on the water as small fishing boats rise and fall slowly on the tide. At the water's edge, small boatsheds sit amidst the vegetation, the beech branches bending slightly in the dappled sunlight. This is the world of Sheryl McCammon's softly warm acrylic paintings, a world where time is slow and the waters lap gently.
McCammon's paintings, with their clear, clean lines and flat, opaque paint, excellently encapsulate this lazy, half-remembered mood. The paintings are all devoid of human figures, yet the presence of human life is everywhere. It is this air of the people having just popped out for a minute, maybe never to return, that is largely responsible for capturing the sense of place and making the works so poignant.
The artist's strength has always been her ability to depict the changing patterns of light on the flowing water and the small details of ageing timbers and fraying rope. Images like the neglected peeling weatherboards and tattered curtain of Blue moon, or Casting shadows, with its sturdy padlock holding the creaky wooden door to the rusting iron of a dilapidated shed, pinpoint the essence of the images' individual stories in ways that words alone could rarely hope to achieve.
![Untitled (c. mid 1990s, [pink 3]), by Martin Thompson, 415mm×590mm. Photo: courtesy of Brett...](https://www.odt.co.nz/sites/default/files/styles/odt_landscape_small_related_stories/public/story/2024/02/untitled_pink_3.jpg?itok=Q0aQrc9o)
