Art seen: 1 September

They Came to Me in the Night, by Wesley John Fourie.

Wesley John Fourie’s artwork places us within, and surrounded by, a canopy of painted and embroidered trees.

The works are directly influenced by the artist’s time working on the Milford Track, but also have a symbolic logic to them. They work as an allegory and analogy for the deep mental forests through which we plough daily, and the deeds and actions through which we interact with nature — often to the detriment of the natural world.

This connectedness, the symbiosis of humanity and bush, is enlarged upon by the poem by Fourie which accompanies the exhibition, with its "happy/loaded memory of melting [ ... ] into the earth, dancing". The forest becomes our entire world, its forms revealing a sacred architecture.

And yet, we remain lost in those forms. Fourie’s paintings and needlework are dense, deeply coloured images, filled with painterly strokes and abstractions, and often sitting at the borders of direct recognition. We know that this is the forest, yet specific details elude us. In works where the colour is removed, forms reduce even further, single ponga-like plants standing out from a background of fluctuating pattern and line. This fluidity is deliberate, and forms another analogy, this time with the artist’s views on the shifting, transforming patterns of life, sexuality, and existence.

Tarawera Cloak, by Philippa Blair.

Gallery Fe29 is currently showing "Metamorphosis", a retrospective covering 40 years of the work of Philippa Blair, a New Zealand artist better known in — and for many years a resident of — the United States. The exhibition includes many smaller works, mainly gestural abstracts in gouache or ink on paper, but the main body of work in this display is two major series of works on unstretched canvas, "Cloaks" and "Books".

The Cloak works are presented as sculptural pieces, constructed from painted unstretched canvas wrapped in almost kimono-like shapes, held and complemented by bamboo rods. The viewed results come with a slight shock, as the pieces are presented as if they contain invisible living bodies. There is a feeling of strength and power in these works, as is only right; the designs were largely inspired by the worldwide tradition of heavily adorned costume being associated with high status.

The Book works are also created from unstretched canvas. These large pieces feature twisted sheets hanging as if they are pages from giant opened books. The effect is to create three-dimensional paintings, seemingly falling into the gallery space from their positions on the wall. The boldness of the works, along with the sheer exuberance of the colours used, allows these abstract pieces to dominate their surroundings in the gallery.

Untitled (Dunedin Botanic Gardens, Rock Garden), by Joanna Margaret Paul.

The work of Joanna Margaret Paul is the subject of an exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery, focusing on the late artist’s love of nature.

Botanical gardens and the wild profusion of blooms seen from their gravel walkways were a popular subject with Paul, and feature in many of her impressionistic watercolours and sketches. With the application of a few simple strokes, the artist was able to convey the forms of the plants and something of their life, as exemplified here by the simple aquarelle lines of Untitled (Palm). The use of textured watercolour paper for several of the sketches adds a pleasant, "stone-rubbing" quality, most notably in Untitled (Dunedin Botanic Gardens), a rare heady pastel work in which the artist has left off her more usual minimalist approach to completely fill the page.

It is the more austere pieces which often have the greater charm, however; the seated figures of Untitled (Government Gardens Rotorua) are implied as much as detailed, and the scene occupies just a fraction of the page, giving us the feeling of voyeuristically watching the crowd from a distance. In several of the "Orchids in the Winter Gardens" works, the background is reduced to a rough grid of horizontal and vertical lines, against which the flowers stand clear as natural features in a regimented human world.