Art seen: October 24

Lake Pukaki by Andi Regan. PHOTO: L ELLIOTT

(Lakes District Museum & Gallery, Queenstown)

From one heritage destination to another, Old Cromwell’s Hullabaloo Art Space collective have temporarily transplanted to Arrowtown, with a beautiful guest exhibition at the Lakes District Museum & Gallery. With over 90 works on display, encompassing paintings, photography, jewellery, ceramics and some truly impressive feats of sculpture, there’s very much something for everyone, and the show has been cleverly curated; thematically or tonally, many of the works seem a natural extension of one another.

Carmen Burgi’s steel and garnet Hot Spot casts a shadow with the illusion of both a target and a nest, leading on to Lorraine Higgins’ portals of vibrant, encircled birds and lush gardens. Andi Regan’s nylon bird sculptures take flight across the wall, seeming to soar free from their landscape spheres; her azure Lake Pukaki, the midnight depths of Knights Point, West Coast, and the aerial patchwork of Waitaki Farmlands are alone worth the visit.

In Gold Fever Falls, Gail de Jong uses aluminium as her canvas, the metallic gleam enhancing the hint of gold in the hills and the sheen of falling water and mist. Ro Bradshaw’s Blue Skies No. 3 juxtaposes the textural grittiness of earth, rock and rust against the celestial peace of a clear sky, the tones of the latter echoed in Robert Franklin’s gorgeous Ash Glazed Vase. Conversely, the sky in Jen Olsen’s expressive Whispers is swirled and circling with the manifestation of spite, her central figure standing resolutely against the long-reaching shadows of rumour and gossip.

The Spirit of Them by Deborah Moss. PHOTO: GALLERY THIRTY THREE

(Gallery Thirty Three, Wanaka)

Deborah Moss’s "Tracks and Traces" is a record of the artist’s adventures around her rural studios in Wainui — journeys through both the physical world and her own imagination and realisation. Using sketchbooks to jot down notes, random observations and memories, Moss inserts excerpts into her abstract paintings, a whisper of handwriting winding around a grassy path, a few sketched symbols tucked amidst the brushstrokes. The effect is very immediate, organic and personal, a similar feeling to opening a book and finding a little note scrawled in the margin or on the border of a map.

It’s a blending of the visible and the hidden, as if the imagery in the paintings is an abstract impression of the physical land, the trees and fields and rivers we would all see if we were to follow the same tracks and trails, but interspersed throughout are the traces of the individual, the imprint of the mind and heart behind the work. Moss uses colour carefully, to indicate perhaps both the impact of weather and light, and her own mood and feeling for where she walked. In works like Gathering Autumn, bright splashes herald the last curtain call of summer and the encroaching hues of gold and grey; Portal is a busy cluster of earthen tones, with light peeking through a gossamer veil, as if wonders await beyond; while The Spirit of Them is far more pared back and muted in tone, with stretches of blank space and a slight air of melancholy.

Dunstan Shadows by Richard Parsons. PHOTO: EADE GALLERY

(Eade Gallery, Clyde)

In a hushed, sunlit sanctuary, a living cathedral of towering trees and entwined branches, an empty chair waits for you. There’s a sense of enchantment and endless curiosity in Rob Foote’s art, and his charcoal drawing Sanctum 12 is a reminder that amidst the darkness, the world is also full of wonderful sights and important moments of pure peace.

That air of stillness and contentment finds an echo in Richard Parsons’s Dunstan Shadows, a beautiful new oil landscape where the light glides across the foreground in a golden glow, casting the background mountains into a muted, misty haze.

Jane McIntosh’s Crown Range to Queenstown has a bolder autumnal palette, the setting sun spotlighting scattered trees and dwellings. McIntosh uses both smooth sweeps of paint and short, textural dabs; the latter leave an impression of movement and transience in the human presence and the turning leaves, the ever-changing seasons, while the rocky peaks beyond remain solid and steady. The thick impasto technique is also extremely effective in McIntosh’s Sheep in the Vineyards, Lake Wanaka, lending an almost tactile sensation to the ewes’ fleece and the plush grass, with the water gleaming like sunlit glass.

From quiet serenity to bright, bubbling joy, Debbie McCaw’s collage Priceless takes shape from scraps of advertisements and commercial copy, words and images that promise happiness and fulfilment for a price, but as the title indicates, it’s the palpable love and friendship of her giggling subjects that really matters.

By Laura Elliott