Catherine Bagnall and Kathy Barry explore that customary image of beauty: the
flower. By freezing roses in paint and aligning detailed botanical drawings with
pseudo-architectural structures, these artists comment on our cultivation and
containment of nature. Yet nature thwarts our attempts to control it. Catherine
Bagnall’s Flowers are Forever evoke the living messengers of beauty and love.
But deliberately imperfect and almost disintegrating off the canvas, the fabric
roses disrupt the ideals of perfection and purity which we impose upon nature.
Kathy Barry’s drawings of flowers reference the scientific tradition which
orders our perceptions of nature through the means of drawing, naming and
classifying. The floating flowers drawn on large sheets of paper pinned directly to
the wall are also reminiscent of wallpaper, suggesting that botanical
representations of nature have something in common with the reduction of nature
to decoration and ornamentation. Yet these drawings subvert the idea that nature
is easily contained or controlled. The flowers display a geometric precision
absent in the sketches of structural models, and they dwarf the structures which
share their shadowy, residual landscape.
While Catherine Bagnall and Kathy Barry examine images of beauty, the work of
Emma Febvre-Richards and Maddie Leach engages with the experience of beauty
both within the art gallery and outside it. Experiencing beauty involves both the
mind and the body, the reason and the senses. The works in Febvre-Richards’
series Topos were made by casting the canvas stretcher in various materials
including plaster and resin. The ineffable beauty of Topos is not a result of the
artist’s expressive creativity, but an outcome of a systematic process of
mould-making.
This exhibition includes photographic documentation of Maddie Leach’s Pariah
Tables as well as the tables themselves in the café courtyard outside the Michael
Hirschfeld Gallery. In both their prior installation on Quail Island in Lyttelton
Harbour (once a leper colony and now a Department of Conservation Recreational
Reserve) and in their re-installation in Practising Beauty, these objects
structure what Leach calls the ‘art of idle moments’. Viewing the Pariah Tables is
a sensory and contemplative experience which is imbued with a still and quiet
beauty, an experience no less real for its intangibility.
Practising Beauty explores the construction of beauty as an active part of artistic
practice. It also explores the beauty suffused in the practice of viewing art. As
Louise Bourgeois suggests, there is beauty in both the intellectual epiphany, the
brief moment of ‘getting’ something, and in the sensory perception of beauty. But
it is a glimpsed, passing intensity which is beautiful because it escapes
permanent capture. Rebecca Wilson
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