Two very different approaches to landscape painting will be shown in Dunedin in coming weeks. Rebecca Fox talks to Jenna Packer about her work.
Loud classical music pours out of a weatherboard studio on the side of the hill at Waitati as the sun pours in on Jenna Packer while she painstakingly paints in the tiny figures on her latest work.
She has been at work since 5am.
''I couldn't sleep so I came out here,'' she says, looking around at the three large-scale works that she is working on, on easels and propped up against the walls, in various stages of completion.
''I like working on more than one thing at a time, they feed into each other.
''I feel like I'm working on a story and I want to keep the pieces following.''
However, it was not always this way.
For many years, she painted ''in the corner of the lounge on top of the Lego or in the kitchen'' in her rare spare time as her children grew up.
''I couldn't use oil paints because I was having to use it in spaces we lived in and I had so little time to work.
''So with the acrylics I could put down an image quickly.''
Her way of using acrylics echoed a course she did on Italian frescoes using pigments suspended in water, she said.
''I really enjoyed discovering that it worked that way. So I'm trying to develop that way of working as it suits the way I like to work, working things out as I go.''
Now working on large canvases, some bigger than herself, was ''scary'', she said.
''I love being able to work on the big scale.''
The scale of the people had not changed but she had found she could make bigger stories and let herself enjoy the spaces, the empty water or the distance.
''I've ended up doing a lot of landscapes but I don't think of them as landscapes, they are the setting for a story.''
Even as a child she was always drawing and as she got older she began to understand it was a way of ''making her thoughts visible'', enabling her to work through emotions as someone would writing a diary.
''You can see what you thought or felt and you work with it. I'm quite interested in that process of anchoring your thoughts.''
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Drawing and then painting in a figurative way was a style hard to hang on to when she studied at Ilam School of Art in Christchurch, she said.
''There was hardly anyone working figuratively and you had to be quite stubborn to keep doing that sort of work, but if that's what you love doing it's second nature to draw what's around you, and the things in your imagination.''
So for her there was a whole layer of abstract construction under her latest works which was more to do with ''the psychological state or emotional state''.
It was the framework, the narrative, that other people could understand which sat on top of it, she said.
''I feel like I see it, once I've made it. I recognise it but you have to put it on to canvas to see it.''
Her love of history grew while studying it alongside art, which led to an honours year studying history alone.
''It was fascinating, there was a lot of stuff about ways of thinking but I really missed actually doing it [art].''
That was the great thing about being at the stage she was now, she said.
''It doesn't feel so much like it's a choice. I'm able to do lots of reading and researching.''
She was reading Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything about a failed economic system's impact on the climate change debate, an issue Ms Packer was trying to grapple with in her work.
''She uses metaphor in a way I really connect with. She connects all sorts of things and so am I, so I can try and understand the history of where we are and play with past and present and future all on the same canvas.''
A quote of Klein says: ''Climate change demands that we invest in publicly owned bones of our societies made brittle by decades of neglect'' which created an image she translated into the large skeletons which feature in some of her work.
A previous image she used of Merrill Lynch's (John Key's previous employer) symbol of the bull had now moved on to a decaying bull skeleton in the landscape.
''Now I'm looking at deconstructing big idols, those great big monumental statues and show that they are just constructions.
''I want to show it [the market] is a construct, it is human and it can be deconstructed in the same way it's been constructed, propped up and burnished, and held up above the real people, the people that are effectively enabling it.''
There are a lot of classical and biblical references in the work, she said.
''Once I started looking at those ideas and went to look up the image of the Bank of England and it's so much like a temple. I knew that in a way but didn't know it till I painted it in the same picture.
''It struck me very strongly. The references that pull us so strongly.''
She tried to pull in some of those images that were recognisably from the past - the work camps and lining up for jobs - from the 1930s.
''Seeing the things [that] are happening I feel we've been there in so many ways.''
As she got older she found her work was being influenced by her life experience.
''I'm able to pull in all sorts of things I've learnt into the work.''
Among those experiences was her time living overseas, especially her time in small isolated communities in France.
''It was a rich artistic, intellectual life there.''
Many French students had returned to the land after the 1968 student riots, repopulating abandoned farms and hamlets.
''So there was this neo-peasant movement and yet they still had part of the intellectual life from the city. So it was really quite rich.''
Having enjoyed that lifestyle she sought something similar in New Zealand when she and her partner returned with a baby. They wanted to be semi-self-sustainable and be part of a community.
''Waitati felt good as it's close enough to Dunedin, yet it had that kind of amazing feeling of community focused on a library and a school. There were values here that seemed to really fit.''
Growing up in cities, Ms Packer never had a strong sense of community until living in France. The only thing about her time there was not being able to paint, so she has numerous notebooks filled with drawings.
''I drew every day as I was desperate to hang on to who I was and I still use them. They're a great resource.''
