existenti-artism

art writings

form and existence

A short essay to accompany the ‘body art’ imagery. Video artist Bill Viola who focuses on human experiences once said that your wound is where the light enters you, and that as long as you keep looking at the bandaged place you’ll see the pain and beauty. 

walking the absurd

Exploring cultural identity and feminism using the body in art with a focus on Angela Tiatia’s 2014 video artwork, Walking the Wall. Tiatia uses her body to express the contradictions that push and pull on bodies. This essay draws upon thinkers in this sphere including Olu Oguibe and Brendan Hokowhitu and a feminist art heritage.

outliving the decay

In considering ‘vanitas’ imagery. 17thC painter Rachel Ruysch became known as one of the greatest flower painters of her time, but there is more to her work. I refer to its mesmeric vanitas aspect, a reflection of womanhood? Yet Ruysch’s paintings and the woman herself live on. This essay looks at the Dutch society and time in which she lived, and how that helped Ruysch to be recognised as an artist when women artists were routinely unvalued or undermined.

The weird fiction of Robert Scott

This essay is written in celebration of Robert’s exhibition The Stand, showing at RDS Gallery, 6 Castle Street, Dunedin, 14 February to 1 April 2025. Robert is most famed for being one of The Clean and front person of The Bats, yet he is equally prolific in his visual art and paintings. A sense of the spooky, the creepy and the magical has been said of his paintings. 

FIGHTINGFIT

Exhibition by Gareth Brighton at New Lands. gallery and project space October 2023. Where we find new friends. Materialism laid bare – my art historian brain plays with Paul Klee and Robert Rauschenberg in a new century kiwi blender.

Potion

Essay on the occasion of the Anita DeSoto exhibition, Potion at Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore, Aotearoa-New Zealand, 30 March – 12 May 2024. In both history and narrative, women, and their knowledge have been murdered, silenced, forgotten, their stories minimised, even romanticised. Anita’s Potion seeks to aid in redressing this injustice.

Stonework

Oamaru stone relief sculptures with soul – or rather the Māori word mauri is a closer characterisation. Each of my stones are unique – designed and carved for the individual, family or place where it will be situated.