The art of small things

Two different artists using two different mediums find a mingling point in a new exhibition that celebrates small things that are often overlooked.

Photographer David Lupton and artist Raemon Rolfe are sharing space at Palmerston North’s Taylor-jensen Fine Arts for their exhibition The Infinite Smallness of Being.

Rolfe, from Feilding, has seven small diptychs on show and Lupton, of Palmerston North, has contributed 13 works printed in black and white.

Rolfe said her paintings were made by mixing oil paint with wax and then incorporating materials such as sand, ash and marble. They were inspired by ‘‘the processes that occur in the universe at the smallest end of the scale’’. ‘‘The idea that we are made up of atoms and that those atoms have consciousness and curiosity so that we can wonder about our place in the universe is the theme of the series. The poem An Atom in the Universe, by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, was the inspiration.’’

Lupton’s photographs are part of an ongoing project he is working on with Brazilian poet and author Leonel Alvarado and Lupton said it was another poet friend who helped with his inspiration.

‘‘I have been thinking a lot about a part of a poem by my friend Adriana Lisboa. It’s not the complete poem. It is the half that keeps floating around like a seductive cloud in a darkening sky that I cannot stop looking at. It’s a challenge to fill emptiness with the universal while trying to describe the near nothingness of simple things – how to see what is invisible at the same time and capture both in a fraction of a second.’’

Rolfe is a self-taught artist who has exhibited extensively and taught in the Palmerston North Girls’ High School art department for 25 years.

Lupton is a photographer whose most recent general audience publication was Between the Rivers: The Manawatu¯ , authored with Bettina Anderson. The Infinite Smallness of Being runs at Taylor-jensen Fine Arts until August 1.