Where paint and sculpture collide
Warren Feeney meets an artist keen to sculpt her own career path.
Christchurch-based artist Tyne Gordon is the 31st recipient of the Olivia Spencer Bower Award (OSB).
First presented in 1987 through the legacy of the artist’s estate, the OSB Award is keenly sought after for two reasons. It was set up by a full-time professional artist with its terms focusing on supporting like-minded artists and its status is now measured by an impressive list of recipients over the past three decades.
As the 2018 recipient, the award will allow Gordon to devote her energies to ‘‘painting and sculpture freed from the necessity to seek outside employment’’.
As part of a group of Canterbury-based artists that included Louise Henderson and Rita Angus in the 1930s, Spencer Bower realised the benefits that such an award could make to an artist’s life in the development of their arts practice and career. Gordon will take up her 12-month residency in an artist’s studio close to the centre of the city from January.
She is looking forward to the prospects offered by the award, suggesting that there must be previous OSB recipients and other artists who have received similar studio residencies who would not have been able to get their work to where they did without such an opportunity. (She also cites the example of the Frances Hodgkins Award and an artist like Gretchen Albrecht, acknowledging that she would never have developed her trademark semi-circular and ovalshaped canvases without her time in residency in Dunedin).
Focused on promising ‘‘emerging’’ painters and sculptors, Gordon’s selection is well-considered. Graduating with a Batchelor of Fine Arts with First Class honours in 2015 from the University of Canterbury, she has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions during the past four years, including Precarious Nature at CoCA Toi Moroki in 2016 and as a finalist in the national drawing award, the Parkin Prize, in 2015 and 2016.
Her submission for the OSB Award concentrated on the ‘‘idea of time as the most important thing for an artist, exploring and developing your practice and having the time to do so’’.
She also emphasises that she has a framework for the development of new work, but cannot forecast where it will have taken her by the end of 2018.
‘‘My work is so unpredictable I cannot say where I will be. I am using new materials and techniques and in terms of outcomes I could not say. I take it as a given that I cannot work from a formula.’’
Gordon’s paintings and sculptures give consideration to the qualities of the materials she is using and the traditions and contexts that they belong to in the fine arts, testing our perceptions about painting and sculpture.
Paradox hold sway in her methodology and in principle; chaos and control, big and small, three-dimensional objects played off against two-dimensional paintings and the domesticated and the wild. ‘‘I assert control in my treatment of my materials and I am working on paintings that are about landscape, but only on a very small scale.’’
Although she is conscious of connections between her paintings and a history of art that they have associations with, (German Romanticism, Neo-Expressionism or artists like Helen Frankenthaler), the interaction that her work has with these and other traditions is more complex than a joining of the dots between artistic influences.
She singles out rising American painter Loie Hollowell, whose work was recently described as ‘‘instinctively comprehensible… abstractions of the human body, focusing on sexuality and female forms’’. In offering the suggestion and realities of such subjects and their possibilities in a single image, in Hollowell’s paintings they become something else that only paint-on-canvas as a means of visual experience is capable of delivering. Hollowell makes images that are complex and puzzling – yet surprising in their coherency.
Gordon’s interest in such imagery is matched by her enthusiasm for the possibilities of the materials and conventions of her own work. ‘‘I love paint. It is so physical and I love the way you can create opposing textures through various paint mediums.’’
Her painting Dinner Party might suggest an immediate link to artists like Amselm Keifer, but she sidesteps his scale and panoramic vistas for a more intimate take on the land. In spite of its title, Dinner Party is like a devotional image or homage to landscape, with Gordon’s choice in naming it, equally contrary, asking us to consider other possible narratives.
And the connection between her painting and sculpture? Gordon says that, in addition to the oil-on-board paintings, she has just started working with their frames as well, ‘‘making them more sculptural and I intend to explore different unconventional materials next year’’. Dinner Party draws as much attention to its frame as it does the painted image, functioning as both a sculptural object as well as a painting.
‘‘The sculptures are domestic in scale and they have a relationship with the painting, but they are not replicas of the paintings. They heighten their domesticity and are just as obsessive in their treatment of surfaces and materials.’’
She also acknowledges her interest in disrupting expectations of given traditions of landscape.
‘‘Landscapes tend to be big and I am interested in taking that notion and bringing them back into a domestic setting. In their own way, they have an intensity about them.
‘‘Because they are smaller than traditional landscape paintings, I have more control over them. There is something special about zoning in on this one little area of a work. I guess it is my way of controlling chaos. I do not use photographs any more as a reference for my painting, and that is also another way of controlling them, making fake landscapes instead, but the materials I am working with still remain very important.’’
Sweet Flesh Prize is a threedimensional work, an assemblage of geometric items crowned by a salt-and-pepper shaker in intimate embrace, supported from beneath by a large slab of finely worked soap.
‘‘The sculpture uses glass and marble and the soap and its association with the body is important, a looking back to feminism and feminist art from the 1970s.The sculptures are still small and I cannot help but think about how big they might be. I want the objects to get bigger and that’s partly why I am excited about the OSB Award, it will allow time and space to let them grow.’’