Canterbury multi-disciplinary artist and designer Mel Eaton laid out an ambitious set of goals for herself at the start of the year.
She planned to back her artwork by leaving her full-time job working for a bathroom design company to establish an art gallery in Rangiora and have her first solo art exhibition.
She ticked off the last of those three goals at the opening night of her new exhibition, Lighten Up, at the Ruataniwha Kaiapoi Civic Centre’s Art on the Quay Gallery.
However, there have been other significant achievements during the year as well, including hosting a packed opening night for Grant Davey’s popular Treasures of the Ashley-Rakahuri River photographic exhibition, at her new upstairs Fold Studio and Gallery in Rangiora.
She also collaborated with Christchurch artist, Margot Korhonen, to create the Cure Boating Club mural in Kaiapoi, and completed a mural celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Rangiora Borough School’s bilingual unit/Ngā Rākau e Rua.
The opportunity for Mel to hold her first solo exhibition came after an unexpected gap opened up in the Art on the Quay Gallery’s exhibition schedule.
When the gallery's manager Jackie Watson contacted Mel to see if she would be interested in holding an exhibition during that time she was excited to take advantage of the opportunity.
Lighten Up brings together several bodies of work that play with illusion, nostalgia, humour and materiality.
Using trompe l’oeil (French term for creating artwork depicting an optical illusion) painting and a dash of visual wit, Mel asks viewers to reconsider surface and substance, reflection and inflation, both literal and metaphorical.
This is a show about lightness in different forms: Light as humour, as weightlessness, as illumination," she says.
- Lighten Up closes on January 7.
