“I have been exhibiting for 42 years, for many years there was a strong sculptural component, but since 2003 I have found that painting has been a clearer and faster means of expressing my ideas. My work has won awards in New Zealand including the 2010 Heartland Sculpture Competition, and I have been short-listed for the 2009 James Wallace Fulbright Scholarship, and was also awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago for the year of 1984.
"Balance is an exhibition of recent paintings from a much longer series of works with a political and satirical background that look at contemporary social and political changes around the challenges to democracy from corporate power. Monopolistic capitalism puts wealth and power in the hands of fewer people. These paintings examine the individual motives behind the desire for power, and the desire to use money to buy power, and how that affects the majority who have little power in the equation. What I paint evolves organically and fluidly. The central figures in my works have evolved and metamorphosed, taking on different new guises, able to transform by losing their physical identity to become a new character or actor in the action. What for me started as a series of drawings of abstract circles in 1997 became simple faces and heads then the ampersand forms cut out of metal by 2003. Tiki Baby came out of the ampersands and by 2007 the aeroplane engine head. Now the Cro-Magnon head with technological undertones has evolved out of that.”
Opening & artist talk 14 July 1:30pm
14 July—26 August
