Art seen: October 5

Rivets and Steel, by Nigel Brown.

(Pea Sea Art)

Pea Sea Art is hosting a group show raising funds to help the Port Chalmers’ art community. As well as being a showcase of work by artists connected to the port, money from the sales will be going towards the ongoing transformation of the former industrial Stevenson and Cook building into an art hub.

Many of the works created for the exhibition have used the building’s former role as an engineering factory as inspiration, with pieces reflecting the port’s industrial past. These range from Jerry Howlett’s Tree Barque, a quirkily attractive diorama of a robotic ship, through to strong metal constructions by Guy Garey and David Fenwick, and two works — a Nigel Brown painting and a Manu Berry print — which share the exhibition’s title. Other impressive works on display include jewellery by John Z Robinson and Angus Goodwin, a bowl by Ali Howlett, and a Marion Wassenaar linocut.

The exhibition is completed by local pupils’ paintings, created using aluminium as frames and canvas. The reflective nature of the material gives these works an inner glow which very effectively sets them apart from most arrays of children’s art. This work will remain on public display after the close of the exhibition, and will eventually find a home within the new art complex.

Condenser Towers, by Murray Eskdale.

(Olga)

Heavy industry also forms one of the inspirations for the latest exhibition at Olga, a joint display featuring photographs by Marc Doesburg and Murray Eskdale.

Eskdale’s images, under the title "When We Mean To Build", present a series of stark, unpeopled Dunedin townscapes, focusing heavily on the joyless facades of industrial sites. The brutal architecture of Dunedin Hospital and the city’s wharves become cold, heartless machines, yet the subjects also pick up their own personalities in these works. The starkness of images such as Pipe and Condenser Towers is reinforced by the photo-reportage feel created by the artist’s eye and the hard monochrome of his medium.

If Eskdale’s images capture the hard constructions, Doesburg’s "A Selection of Works" provides the softer human element. There is still a photojournalistic feel, but the focus is firmly on the people.

Photographed in various locations around the world, groups and individuals take centre stage in many of the pieces, especially groups of children. In other works, museum artefacts become the subjects. There is a feeling of a narrative in the pieces, as if there is a natural lineage stretching from the artefact to the child.

Between them, the two series of works excellently complement each other, the industrial dark and the more human light forming two halves of our societal whole.

11 September 2023 by Evan Woodruffe.

(Fe29 Gallery)

Evan Woodruffe’s exhibition at Fe29 Gallery features a selection of mixed-media abstracts, constructed predominantly from acrylic and fabric.

Woodruffe’s work ranges across several disciplines, with his love of music feeding into both painting and fabric design.

The two latter media have become a closed loop, with each influencing the other; painted images become the basis of clothing, and the cloth becoming part of the ground over which the paintings are created.

This addition to the canvas adds a deliberate uncertainty and tension to the images.

Over all of this, the lyricism and the melodic and rhythmic patterns of music become the stimulus for the addition of bold gestural sweeps of paint.

Through this mark-making over an uneven surface, the artist is attempting to provide a concrete depiction of the great intangibles of human life — thought, emotion, the passage of time, and growth.

The resulting works become a secret personal language for the artist, with a liberal use of colour combinations.

In the implied skyscape of 8th August 2021, the tones are delicate and subtle.

Elsewhere, the same palette is subverted by the addition of one bold tone.

For me, however, the strongest works in the collection are three pieces which concentrate on the bold, with bright vermilion and green leaping from a rich indigo base.

By James Dignan