Works a salute to home and garden
Warren Feeney discovers why one returning artist’s first solo exhibition in six years offers plenty of food for thought.
‘It is sort of a homage to the home gardener,’’ says artist Zina Swanson about her current exhibition My hand is a season at the Jonathan Smart Gallery.
Swanson is holding her first solo exhibition in Christchurch since Blue, which opened in 2011 in the now defunct ABC Gallery on Lincoln Rd.
She returned to Christchurch early in 2016, after almost a year in Auckland and then two years in Dunedin, after the 2011 quakes.
‘‘Dunedin has a small, but supportive art community. I miss the walk down High St into the city.
‘‘That is one thing that gets to me about living back in Christchurch... the flatness. Dunedin has a small, but good community, and feels a bit like living in a seaside town, and The Blue Oyster and Brett McDowell galleries are amazing.’’
She says that it is a bit hard being back in Christchurch. She and partner James Oram do not have studios.
‘‘We share a spare bedroom as a studio. It is not ideal, but then I also never thought that I would like working from home and it is fine. Having had so many studios away from home over the years, I think I convinced myself that working from home wasn’t for me... but actually I think it is!
‘‘However, I do miss going between galleries in the central city around High St and the Christchurch Art Gallery.
‘‘I have a great job in the Engineering and Physical Sciences Library at the University of Canterbury.
‘‘The hours and people are great and I do have a fondness for the forestry section, where I regularly stumble across obscure gems.
‘‘One of the first books I found when I started working there back in 2010 was a ‘grafter’s handbook’. It is a 17th-century publication and it informed the subjects of a series of works on paper that I did, Symptoms of incompatibility, at SoFA Gallery in Christchurch. ‘‘
Swanson’s exhibition My hand is a season occupies both gallery spaces at the Jonathan Smart Gallery, and consists of a series of small works on paper, a sculptural installation and a wall-relief work. The installation My hand is a
season, is a free-standing aluminium tree with items hanging from the geometry of its flowering branches and an adjacent work on paper on the gallery wall. There are white sneakers, ivy, a segment of a branch, a tap handle, a kneeling mat and other items, all representative of the routine tools of the gardener’s trade, but there is a care and meticulousness in Swanson’s choice of objects, their shapes and colours and their placement. A rainbow-coloured branch punctuates the uniform spread of the green of her tree construction and the ivy crawling along one branch is just enough to elicit a sense of growth and animation.
Swanson says she is still ‘‘getting to know’’ the title work,
My hand is a season. The title came from the drawing that accompanies the sculpture – a painting outline of her hand in seasonally related tones. The ivy on it was grown at home for months before the exhibition.
‘‘It seems that I either care for the plants in the work or let them die. And the tree was never initially meant to have shoes. It was hard to find generic shoes without any branding. I did find myself laughing out loud when trying to decide what size shoes to buy for the sculpture…’definitely not a 10... not as small as a 6… lets go for a7’. I think the shoes give the work a personality and a sense of humour.’’
Like all the works in the exhibition, My hand is a season considers our relationship with the natural world, yet does so often circling around its subjects, teasing out possibilities and coming to terms with the spirit or intentions of a thought.
She says that her works are often related to the domestic, being about ‘‘what is around me’’. Lawn is just that – grass taken from her lawn at home and pressed to make a net that, when positioned on a glass towel rail attached to the gallery wall, also begins to looks like a towel.
‘‘The towel rail is domestic and it has an obvious relationship with the body. It fits this corner space in the gallery as though it is in the corner of a bathroom.’’
Peter Tompkins’ The Secret Life
of Plants (published in 1973) is also of interest to Swanson as a book that expresses its faith in the idea that plants are essentially conscious, breathing creatures.
In a work on paper, Focus on one, she visualises a scenario from
The Secret Life of Plants and its claims and speculations about the assumptions of sentient plant life; when a person ignores one plant but gives attention to the other, it means that it lives while the other one dies.
Swanson says that most of the time she does not make plans for any of the smaller paintings.
‘‘They develop as an idea as they are worked on.’’
Yet, her imagery is as calculated as it is puzzling and enlightening. In Listen, she suspends a leaf in space in front of a microphone, making tangible the divide between the purposes of both objects, yet in their proximity to one another, (and the work’s title), they seem to maintain that although there is ‘‘not a conversation going on, there is a request for one’’.
Reduced to clear is a work on paper of black fingerprints with yellow price tags on them. It is an image that holds all the promises of an explanation – all those tags and numbers over fingerprints must mean something – yet it manages to side-step all apparent certainties.
There are also objects that disguise their presence in the gallery. Look carefully at the corner entrance to the smaller space to find, A cloud or rain or
both, a slim elongated, hand-blown glass rod with numbers, discretely attached to the corner of the wall panel from floor to ceiling. Swanson says that with A cloud
or rain or both, she painted ‘‘all the numbers by hand on the kitchen table. There are 400 of them. The thermometer-like work is partially filled with carrara marble dust. This variety of marble has a long history in sculpture’’.
The thought of classical and renaissance sculptures being reduced to dust was what drew her to the material.
‘‘It is uncertain what this piece is measuring... The wall? The air? The work developed from an earlier painting titled measuring air, measuring nothing.’’