Making Dunedin warm again
Christchurch’s Miranda Parkes talks to Warren Feeney about her Frances Hodgkins Fellowship.
In 2016, Christchurch artist Miranda Parkes became the 49th recipient of Aotearoa New Zealand’s longeststanding and most prestigious contemporary art award, the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin, a 12-month artist’s residency with a studio and the salary of a full-time university lecturer.
Parkes was in the best of company: Ralph Hotere, Michael Smither, Gretchen Albrecht and Shane Cotton are among the many who have been granted the fellowship in its 52-year history.
She had applied three times before and each time, filling out the application form had its own challenges. ‘‘the application has to be quite creative because you have to think about what you are going to do in the future and it is really hard to do that with painting’’.
‘‘I felt confident about applying again. The third time, I had just done a poetry course and I was into writing. So when I wrote the application, the seven pages of writing just came out easily.
‘‘I described a body of work I was going to do and tied it to exhibitions I had just completed and threads from those that I would take forward – but as soon as you get the Hodgkins Award, you let go and let the work do its thing.’’
Hocken Librarian Sharon Dell clarifies that the Hodgkins selection committee is ‘‘not so concerned that the proposal will in fact work out in ways the artist planned… Some artists respond immediately to the environment and the connections they make in Dunedin, while others express these at a later stage’’.
What plans had Parkes made for her residency? ‘‘I kept thinking that I was trying to warm up Dunedin with colour. Basically, I was focused on delivering a decent show for the university’s Hocken Library Gallery because that is the real outcome of the fellowship, but I think that what I wrote in my application did make it into the work I made.’’
Parkes has some regret about not making greater use of the university’s resources.
‘‘I kind of wish I had spent that whole time in the Hocken doing research and then just worked on the works when I got back to Christchurch, but when I arrived in Dunedin I thought I had better get into the studio. Actually, I would have had time to do both.
‘‘I knew I wanted the show to respond to the specific space of the Hocken. I was there in Dunedin to feel out the space and make work that responded to it and I did just start making work in the studio because I knew what I wanted to make.’’
Many of the works exhibited at the Hocken are now installed in the merriest, Parkes’ exhibition at the Jonathan Smart Gallery. Some works that were not used in Dunedin, have also found a place in the Christchurch show.
On the evidence of the range and mix of materials, the varying scale of the works and the diverse painterly treatment of her subjects, Parkes has definitely made the most of her time and the opportunities offered to an artist by the fellowship.
‘‘The whole show in both iterations [Dunedin and Christchurch], is about making an abundant kind of offering, including lots of elements. Hence the Hocken title, [the more] the merrier. That is what the show was consciously doing, so it is not as pared back as another show from me might have been.’’
Parkes conceived and assembled a large silk banner spanning 8.3 metres, papier mache wall reliefs and a sculpture, as well as billowing acrylic on canvas paintings, works that Hocken curator Andrea Bell deftly describes as objects that ‘‘puff, twist and bulge. A multi-sensory experience of silk, paper, metal, paint, video, sound and light’’.
The papier mache works represent an unprecedented new series from Parkes that are neither sculpture nor works on paper. She says they ‘‘came out of the challenge of making works on paper that talked to the rest of my practice in that they were treated as objects, not just like a flat piece of paper that you might have to put in a frame for an exhibition. One way of solving that problem was pressing them on to existing frames and making moulded shapes out of the paper’’.
And the 11 free-standing objects that make up the sculpture inclusions? ‘‘That work started from little chunks of paint I have been saving for about 10 years out of my studio processes, paint taken from the bottom of the tin, just peeling it out and saving it. I had boxes of them and I didn’t know how to present them, but it was something I wanted to achieve for the show, bringing those all together.
‘‘I got these scraps of steel poles and bases and took them to Dunedin boat-builder Henry Watts who welded them together into sculpture stands and placed glass discs on them. Some are high and you look up under into the glass, and some are low, and you look down onto them. So it is really a three-dimensional object.
‘‘Because I am a painter, it did take a while to come to that solution. I always want to put things on the walls and I had tried with these paint forms, but they are sculptures.
‘‘I think it was a really ambitious show. For the sculptures, I was doing things that I don’t always do, and the banner, because it was 8.3 metres, I had to employ a friend who sews for stage sets and I dyed all the pieces of silk. So I learnt a new process.’’
Parkes also acknowledges the importance of the time towards the end of her residency and having the support of university staff.
‘‘The Hocken Library is not a commercial environment, but it is a critical environment. I felt confident that if I put something out there that is a new idea, or one that has a ‘fragility’ about it, it would be received by people and it wouldn’t get lost. I was working with two amazing curators. I had head curator pictorial collections, Robyn Notman, and art curator Andrea Bell.
‘‘They were quite driven. I always knew we would have too many elements for the Hocken and that it was about creating a balance – a sort of abundant balance. For an exhibition, that is not a very kind thing to throw at a curator and they were really understanding and wanted to work with me in that way.
‘‘You have got to get the exhibition to be harmonious, so that people can digest it but you are also trying to make an unexpected offering that has lots of different materials.
‘‘That white cube, which is the gallery space that we work in without thinking about it, is very strong. White walls have a lot of weight and authority about them and I replaced that with these bright colours. The main room was pink, one of the smaller rooms was bright blue and the video room was like a metallic grey. The colour was a very strong feature of the Hocken show. The audience was immersed in it and it linked everything. That’s doing something that’s subversive, and people pick up on that, I think.
‘‘The merriest at the Jonathan Smart Gallery is not the same show as the merrier at the Hocken, but it has a lot of the same work in it. It feels and reads differently, because at Jonathan’s the space is different.
‘‘I think in Christchurch I wanted to give each work a little more breathing space and that happens with the light. I am really happy with both of the exhibitions. The merriest is not quite the same, but it took that happy feeling and it is running with that, whereas the merrier at the Hocken was about including as much as I possibly could.
‘‘At the Hocken opening, people felt it was an immersive experience. They were looking at each other’s clothing and saying; ‘Oh my gosh! You look amazing against that wall’. They were taking photographs of one another in their bright clothing.
‘‘It was in-your-face and it was an experience. Noticing your own body in the gallery space was part of it, and it did do what I was hoping for – that the installation would be more than the sum of its parts.’’
"White walls have a lot of weight and authority about them and I replaced that with these bright colours."
Miranda Parkes