Beauty, Terror and the Sublime

The Sublime is not strictly speaking something which is proven or demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel.Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux The passion caused by the great and Sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its…

The useful art of dealing with critique

A family member is studying design at present and is taking on the daunting task of being critiqued by her tutors and peers. It’s something we all go through if we are in the creative fields and while it may seem daunting, critique can be one of the most beneficial experiences for your practice. I’ve…

“Why are creative women dismissed as ‘quirky’?” – Eva Wiseman

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/08/killer-word-quirky-eva-wiseman That’s a very good question. My work has been called quirky on any number of occasions and every time I hear it I cringe internally and have to hold back from rolling my eyes. There is something very lazy and dismissive about the word which Eva Wiseman manages to articulate well in her article….

A Beautiful Hesitation & Panel Discussion: Exhibiting Art

Last year I went to see Fiona Pardington’s ‘A Beautiful Hesitation’ show at the City Gallery in Wellington. I wrote then about how frustrated I was with the lighting and the layout of the show and was interested to see it in Auckland to find out whether any of those issues had changed. It seems…

Hive Oracle – April 2015

Hive Oracle – watch movie at Vimeo Creating this performative video was a real departure from the mediums I’ve worked in so far. I have a list of words and ideas that I compiled after the April Seminar that I’ve been exploring in my research. – The idea of a shadow world, strangeness in time and…

Work in Progress January 2015

This is a record of the work I made in January 2015. Overall I think this is the least successful work, but I learned a lot of valuable stuff from actually making it. During the creation of the work I went through a repetitive production process that was bordering on ritualistic in it’s experience. The…

Work from September 2014

I realised that I hadn’t posted progress photos of my work from September last year and January this year. Looking back on this work is curious… it’s interesting and it seems like a step towards what I’m trying to create, but just and experiment with materials and ideas. I went from the very clinical, minimalist…

Pre-seminar Inspiration

Yolunda sent me some things to get me motivated before April seminar. All of the quotes in this article were great, but my two favourite are below: “Creating a non-purposive, free space in which to play and have fun is essential. You can tell when you are looking at art that was a drag to…

The Expanded Field

Rosalind E. Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978) (Krauss, R. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths” (1985) The MIT Press; London, England) is a really useful essay that I have read three times and will probably read again. It examines the emergence of Postmodern sculptural practices and how they can be…

Thoughts about works by Tracey Tawhiao and Tiffany Singh at Te Uru

Justine and I visited Te Uru gallery last weekend to have a look at the current exhibitions. There were 2 that were of particular interest to me due to their intersection with, differences and similarities to my own work. Tracey Tawhiao’s work is part of a group show called  IOIOIOIOIOIO that examines the hidden order unifying…