(Port Chalmers Maritime Museum)
Port Chalmers Maritime Museum is inaugurating a small space for art exhibitions with a display by Mary McFarlane, "Ecriture Feminine".
McFarlane aims this exhibition as a response to the increasing restriction of civic rights worldwide, most specifically the erosion of the rights of women and the retrograde steps found in current political thought away from the aims of equality. Using the ideas of French writer Helene Cixous as a starting point, McFarlane explores a new approach to thinking about the creative process, in the hopes of making art that derives from a purely female experience.
The artist has used materials found in nature — sand, rainwater, shells and the like — to create small tableaux deliberately reminiscent of votive icons. These pieces reflect objects made by feminine members of the artist’s family, her mother and her aunt, and attractively yet subtly emphasise the use of such miniature altarpieces within the gender-ambiguous world of the Catholic Church, a religion which historically had great strictures placed upon women but which also elevated the character of the Virgin Mary to near-Godlike status. This dichotomy is reflected in the dual nature of McFarlane’s tableaux, with women in distinctly secular dress as centrepieces of small, impressive shrines.
(RDS Gallery)
Another Port resident, Robert Scott, is presenting in Dunedin itself with a small but impressive exhibition at RDS.
Whereas Scott’s exhibitions usually contain multitudes of small works in and around a handful of larger pieces, concentrating the display down to a mere 11 pieces has had a radical effect on the look of the artist’s work. Scott has avoided displaying his small whimsical pieces at RDS, enjoyable though they may be, and the resulting exhibition appears deeper and more mature as a result.
The artist has created a virtual rural space within the gallery with his art. The display centres on two large groups of trees, the stands of the exhibition title, around which he has placed various scenes of the beach, the bush, and the hills. Human activity has been restricted to two or three pieces, notable among them a strikingly composed work concentrating on the angular forms of shelter belts placed against the undulations of hill and cloud. The smaller Inlet is also an impressive composition, with its landforms expressed in forms rising from the strong horizontals of the coastline and water.
The most intriguing work is possibly The Far Dry Hills, in which several abstracted hillscapes, vaguely reminiscent of Grant Wood’s regionalist art, are effectively placed within a found frame from an old piano.
(Hocken Collections Gallery)
Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux have also brought the rural into the city with their exhibition.
"Radicant" is an impressive exhibition in three sections. The exhibition’s title work is a video, created in collaboration with poet Colleen Coco Collin. In the video, the University of Otago’s botany department’s vintage Brendel botanical models are lovingly displayed, the camera drifting over the pieces as if they were landscapes, to the accompaniment of the voice of Collins, weaving poetry into the stories of the plants depicted.
In Signal, Echo a post containing a small display screen becomes a pou whenua, marking out the gallery space and serving as the central point for a distorted soundscape of multiple foghorns. The screen, showing seeds and leaves, becomes a focus and implied triangulation point within the space.
Between these displays is Pavilion, a literal greenhouse constructed from glass pipes, in which convolvulus cuttings are growing. Bathed in the eerie light of heat lamps, the structure resembles the scaffolding of a science fiction space station more than a conservatory.
The artists’ focus on a noxious weed is poignant, focusing the attention on human decisions about what plants are and aren’t important, and the implication that humans have set themselves up to be unauthorised arbiters of nature.
By James Dignan
