‘‘Paint, Pottery, Pixels’’, Gretl Barzotto, Kathi McLean and Sally Paterson
(Heafey Gallery, Central Stories Museum & Gallery, Alexandra)
In Central Stories’ Heafey Gallery, painter Gretl Barzotto, ceramicist Kathi McLean, and photographer Sally Paterson explore the vistas and history of Central Otago. Working with manmade and natural materials, the artists traverse the land from sunrise to sunset, evoke distant voices and capture both the grandeur and intimacy of the world around them. All who wake in and create in Central Otago know that there’s a distinctive light that glows through the mountains and glitters in the lakes; it’s often painted and etched in hues of burnished gold. Here, it’s also cast in silver — the earlymorning chill coiling through the trees, the delicate shadows through the fog, the sparkle of snow on the rocks. In works like Lakeside Memories, Rose (Blue Lake, St. Bathans), in which the faint outline of a white dress is superimposed over the landscape, Paterson conjures wistful ghosts of the past, the silvery song of memory. Paterson’s technique — subtly, seamlessly layering multiple images into a single viewpoint — takes the viewer on a deep, poignant journey, and makes this one of the most interesting photographic collections of the year.
Barzotto’s brush dances a joyful line between abstraction and realism; with sheer sweeps of pigment and veins of glowing gold, the recognisable outlines of peaks and lakes take shape but with dreamlike beauty. From misty horizons to the clay beneath our feet, McLean’s earthtoned pottery is the grounding element, bringing the experience full circle, casting the magic and imagination into threedimensional form like the treasured relics of a journey.