Flower power
Ayesha Green explores the flatness of paint in her series of botanical paintings that mimic botanical renderings found in the curious and old-fashioned Victorian book The Sentiment of Flowers
Ayesha Green is reclining on her inner- city studio sofa covered by thrift shop sheets in faded 60s florals in hues of lilac, lime and citron. On the wall above her there are floral fabric samples from haberdashery giant Spotlight in saturated ditsy floral prints, motifs that are often in her paintings.
“I love purple so much, I can’t get enough of it — lilac, bluish purple, red purple. I love green too. I never work with bright colours; there’s real harmony in flat colours.”
The artist, who works predominantly in Resene house paint, says the flatness is due to the large amount of white used in making the pigment.
“It also allows me to control the consistency of the colours.”
Her painting style, which is based on illustration, relies on opaque hues and strong graphic lines. Each painting has at least three layers of paint to create the required opacity.
Her recent work for the Auckland Art Fair features works inspired by a book published in 1837, titled The Sentiment of Flowers. The book features detailed botanical drawings accompanied by symbolic scripts that attribute each flower or plant with an emotional meaning. These types of books were common in the Victorian era, and were intended for female readers who were desperately looking for suitors.
“Women were supposed to read into the meaning of the bouquet given to them: a daisy meant joy; a tulip — declaration of love; snowdrop — hope. I found it interesting that plants were given human attributes. It led me to wonder how objects or things in the natural world are given meaning.”
Ayesha, who is of Kāi Tahu and Ngāti Kahungunu descent, explains that te reo also has personifications of nature.
“We talk of mountains being ancestors, and of Papatūānuku — mother earth,” she says.
For this body of work, Ayesha made up her own bouquets, intended for her partner in Dunedin at the time. She chose plants that represent intoxication, innocence, hope, rarity, enchantment and desire.
She left out the more sinister ones — like borage for abruptness or cypress for despair or hydrangea for heartlessness (surely more appropriate for a breakup bunch).
Ayesha doesn’t always paint flowers. Most of her works are narrative-driven and often connect with the idea of how visual language tells the story of our nation.
“I have looked at colonisation, marriage, religion and nationalism and how Māori are included in the national story.”
A common thread to her work is questioning the Eurocentric practices of anthropology and classification. After completing her Master of Fine Arts from Elam in 2013, she went on to complete a graduate diploma in Museums and Cultural Heritage, which furthered her interest in anthropology.
Portraiture is also a strong component of Ayesha’s work. Her next show at Jhana Millers Gallery in Wellington this coming May focuses on portraits of family members and historical figures.
Hanging on the wall are two incomplete large portraits, one of her mother and grandmother standing side by side in their wedding dress — they were married in the same gown — and the other a depiction of Michelangelo’s Pieta sculpture that shows Mary holding the body of Jesus on her lap after the crucifixion.
Both works are in her signature flat style, with backgrounds in shades of lilac. The figures are monumental and in each an area of clothing detail — either lace or floral patterns — draws the eye.
Of her flat painting style, she explains she grew up in an era where cartoonmaking was popular and is convinced this has affected her style.
Her formula is paying off with a number of awards and residencies including the 2019 National Contemporary Art Award, judged by Fiona Pardington for her painting Nana’s Birthday — an almost cartoonlike depiction of a grandmother and grandchildren blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
For now, it’s back to the drawing board, working on the lace patterns of her grandmother’s wedding gown under the soft window light of her Karangahape Rd studio, maybe broken up with the odd nap on the floral sofa to dream up paintings to come.
Berlin-based conceptual artist Zac Langdon-Pole’s hiatus in New Zealand has proved fruitful for his artistic practice. Currently in Auckland, he talks about one of his curious assemblages on show at the Auckland Art Fair and his largest show to date, Containing Multitudes, at City Gallery in Wellington
All great artists are great thinkers and Zac Langdon-Pole, 33, is certainly that. His nimble mind jumps from one supposition to another. Today he’s talking me through his art fair work, Emic Etic (ii).
We have an old wooden tool box with two objects inside. This is what he calls an assemblage — an artwork made up of found or unrelated objects. The first is a replica royal tiara, the second a rusty calf weaner.
You’re not alone if you’ve never heard of the latter.
“Farmers use them to separate calves from their mothers, it’s fitted on the calf’s head, so when it goes to feed, it will prick the mother, and eventually she’ll abandon it.”
Sounds cruel, but Zac isn’t here for a costbenefit analysis of farming. What he’s really interested in is the meaning of each object and how these items, both of which are worn on the head, hold a kernel of history that led to ripples of change.
“The calf weaner represents a point at which profit takes presidence in the practice of farming; it’s really an object that expedited the profitability of farming.”
Another tool of sorts, the tiara represents the monarchy, a form of control.
It’s an odd assortment, but it’s the strangeness that sets off an interesting and divergent conversation.
The farmer will see the calf weaner differently to the environmental activist, the coloniser would view the crown very differently than tangata whenua. A male and female perspective, well now they would definitely differ.
Emic-etic is an anthropological term that refers to the cultural meaning of the subject and the observer, in short, every person who encounters this box will have a different take on it.
Common threads in Zac’s work include duplicity, the fallibility of certainty and the spaces in between.
“The gap between sameness and difference is of interest to me. What I’m realising is reality is a constant jostling between ‘is it this, or is it that’? It’s these twists in perception that intrigue me.”
Of emic-etic work he supposes there could be something just as beautiful about the design of the calf weaner as there is about the tiara.
“I like to reframe and rethink the order of values,” he offers.
When asked about who might buy this piece, or where it might be displayed, or even that it might be a difficult piece to collect, he’s unfazed. “It could go on a wall, on the floor, it could even go in someone’s garage — these are merely objects of the world, with a slight twist,” he suggests with a hint of a smile.
Zac’s career gained momentum after he picked up the BMW Art Journey Prize at Art Basel in 2018, for his work Passport (Argonauta) — a series of sculptures that entwine two organic materials; an argonaut paper nautilus shell and a 4 billion year-old meteorite. The fragile shell is mounted on the wall and inside holds the dense and heavy fragments of time and space, a dualism from the bottom of the ocean and the far-reaching universe.
The shells, he tells me, are made from the secretions of the female Argonauta nodosa — a close relative of the octopus who makes the shell to protect her eggs.
One of the Argonauta sculptures is currently on display at his largest exhibition to date, Containing Multitudes, at City Gallery in Wellington.
The BMW prize allowed the 2010 Elam graduate and Master of Arts graduate from Frankfurt’s Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, to follow through with five months of research loosely based on migration, celestial mapping and evolution.
Zac set off on a journey that followed the flight paths of migrating birds from Europe to the Pacific Islands and finally back home. During the five-month trip, with more than 20 stops, he collaborated with scholars, artists, and navigators, documenting his journey through musings on paper, photography and celestial mapping.
His Containing Multitudes exhibition is an extension of his investigation of his research on migration and human evolution, and many of the works were made here in the first lockdown.
“I was pretty productive actually, there was not as much pressure to create, so the work just unfolded.”
It’s a variety show according to chief curator Robert Leonard, taking multiple forms — puzzles, fossils, artefacts, and oddities and tackling diverse subject matter (the natural world, language and culture).
“The artist wants to stretch us, challenging us ... it’s an opportunity to get our heads across his project or lose ourselves trying,” writes Robert.
In one unexpected and beautiful installation Zac has laid a floor of recycled native timber boards in one of the gallery halls. Not the best boards, the worst —
those once colonised by borer beetles.
Interested in highlighting the activities of these busy little pests and how they habituated the boards, Zac decided to fill the holes with gold leaf and filler to startling effect.
“The whole project took around four months to complete,” he says, with City Gallery staff working overtime to plug the gaps.
When you walk upon the work “gold glitters from the corners of your eyes”, says Zac wistfully.
Other works in the new show include a collection of puzzle works that riff off the question “what belongs where”?
He figured out that all puzzles are made with the same templates, so he could blend different images to make surrealist-looking collages; mostly he sought out Old Master reproductions and encyclopaedia-plate illustrations.
In Pollinations, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting of the Tower of Babel (c.1563) appears and is blended with a vibrant floral still life by Jan Frans van Dael (1792). The Bruegel work attempts to explain the diversity of human language while the still life of mixed flowers seems out of place — does it suggest there is beauty in our differences? It’s up to the viewer to decipher the puzzle within the puzzle.
“I don’t think viewers need to understand the back story, just the implication that something might unfold is enough. An art gallery is one of the few places in the world where we have this ritual where we can let an artwork influence us as much as we influence it. All I can wish for is to open up our normal ways of seeing. Nothing is fixed or static in the world; our sense of identity is always in process. We cannot be ruled by certainty. That’s a trap.”
“WHAT I’M REALISING IS REALITY IS A CONSTANT JOSTLING BETWEEN ‘IS IT THIS, OR IS IT THAT’?” — ZAC LANGDON- POLE