Art seen: Allegorical metalworkings and symbolism

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

Parallel Worlds, by Paul Dibble

Paul Dibble is one of New Zealand's finest living metalworking sculptors. His allegorical pieces, fashioned from bronze and steel, often take as their basis meditations on New Zealand's natural heritage.

An impressive array of Dibble's works, many of them of substantial size, graces Milford Galleries. The pieces are largely inspired by the way mankind has imposed itself, often detrimentally, upon the country's rich natural backdrop, specifically with respect to the country's fragile bird life.

The largest pieces focus on trees, reduced to a bare symbolic form and bedecked with birds and fruit. Kowhai and apples play major roles in the work, and there is a deliberate hint at the latter being a reference to the Genesis story and the prelapsarian state of these islands when humans first arrived here.

Abstract elements, such as the circle, an apt symbol of connectedness and eternity, sit within the paradise of these trees, but the paradise is an illusion: the forms are not realistic, but are deliberately flattened in one dimension. Their lack of depth connotes the fragility of life, the ''now you see it, now you don't'' nature of existence.

The works are a technical tour de force, and are equally impressive in their appearance.

Pinewood Bend 2013, by Judy Darragh

The Blue Oyster Project Space is a new addition to what is rapidly becoming a major city arts hub in Dowling St. What the gallery loses from its old Moray Pl address in atmosphere it makes up for in light and space, though to be fair there is still a ''yet-to-be-completed'' air about it.

The art space's first exhibition is a challenging one, and one which - due to its disparate parts - is difficult to pigeonhole. Judy Darragh's works include a floor installation, mixed media panels, and small painted works.

These smaller paintings carry the idea of impasto to an extreme, becoming hard, sculpted paint on canvas. Line is replaced by physical form in these minimalist abstracts, with the emphasis on hard slabs and globs of colour.

The heart of the gallery contains hanging mixed-media works crafted from PVC movie banners, the original surfaces altered with aerosol and brush. There is both a sense of transformation and transgression in these pieces, the original images vaguely visible behind new abstract work.

Between these panels lies the artist's main exhibit, a metaphysical forest track with thickets of bandaged aluminium. In conjunction with the posters, this suggests our personal transformations and transgressions within our daily journeys through our own dark psychological forests.

Untitled (tea tray), by Zuna Wright

Three artists have new work on display in an exhibition under way at The Artist's Room.

Zuna Wright's forte is the still life, but her paintings of jugs and vases owe as much, if not more, to expressionism than to the realist studies of the likes of Morandi.

The crockery becomes a mere parade of ghost images, created from broad delineations of paint enclosing coloured areas. These are thought-vases, not solid objects, yet there is a compelling nature to the bold brushwork and abstracted form.

Inge Doesburg's work is also becoming more bold and less precise. Her landscapes still bear the hallmarks of someone who has moved from print to paint, and the forms still show the detail of the land.

The difference is in the strong flashes of dark that gash the skies and hills. Doesburg's work was already excellent, but this impulsive freeing of her gestures takes it that one stage further.

Llew Summers provides the three-dimensional forms around which the other two artists play. His solid, tactile bronzes (accompanied by a single wooden carving) display the emotions and interactions of his figures beautifully.

There is something of the spirituality of the symbolist and pre-symbolist artists in his forms, and the deliberate distortions and interplay of the figures create fascinating, effectively composed works.