The wind blows through the gallery
Mark Amery takes a walk up and down, from the city to a major solo show at Kelburn’s Adam Art Gallery.
University has begun and, with it, a show by Kate Newby at Adam Art Gallery, on Victoria’s Kelburn campus. The gallery has had a darkened bunkerlike nature of late and in this respect this gallery-filling installation is a radical agent – opening spaces out to the light, and to the air. Literally: organic-shaped holes in window panes break the institution’s climate control; panes are frosted to glow as if cracked under a natural icy wonderland transformation.
Newby’s work then spills playfully outside: a marked tiled patio beside a bike park below and, way down the hill to another little-noticed space, a ceramic channel in a small park atop The Terrace Tunnel.
With the air heavy with the sound of cicada and smell of kawakawa, a bush walk is offered to and from the city. It’s a gift; for the Adam’s public challenge is its site. Parking is tricky, and from the city it’s a climb. Yet in design and programming the gallery can, as here, play powerfully to this elevated position.
Ian Athfield’s remarkable 1999 building perches in a narrow, steep stairway space between buildings, like an enormous slim black hard-drive, clad by scaly armour as if combating both the elements and indifference to new ideas. Inside are unusually deep vertical and long horizontal spaces and sight lines, which the gallery excels in challenging artists to respond to.
Newby makes us look down, and walk out, relishing what we usually pass by. Employing clay, glass, screed and other earth materials, her work gifts attention to multitudinal diversity in the weathering surfaces around us.
Before Covid-19 Newby, in 2018 and 2019 alone, produced installations in Portland, Bergen, Vienna and Villeurbanne, near Lyon. As a traveller she responds to new spaces with a familiar set of materials and forms, disrupting spaces temporarily with physical changes – here, she cuts a channel into a rubber floor, filling it with small encrusted ceramic vessels; they gather like glittering leaves.
Start your walk through off The Terrace. A long chattering curling channel of clay half pipes runs in the grass, counter to the motorway tunnel beneath. Seventynine named people folded wet clay around their thighs to make it. In its many parts it accepts and holds difference, and encourages creative play, like a small helter-skelter to roll stones down.
Inspired by old open-water drains alongside hill stairways, its lack of positioning for utilitarian function is slightly irritating, yet it offers more active community engagement than the erect monumental art of men you’ll mostly find at the Botanic Gardens.
From an enormous clothesline-like structure stretching across one length of the gallery hang 1000 cast ceramic and glass wind chimes in the light, like a giant necklace for the building.
Arranged to form melodious musical lines, as if on a stave, these provide an open catalogue of associations: pendants, sinkers, skeletons, and icicles. Evoked here and elsewhere is the earth’s surface, cooling, heating, and revealing. The wind chime is precious, fragile, yet like nature and unlike most art objects, it tingles with the aliveness of touch, and is a collective able to withstand breakage. A light breeze through a small hole moves chimes gently, bringing the sounds of sirens and cicadas. Watch when that southerly hits.
In the Kirk Gallery, clusters of painted ceramic rocks celebrate both difference and commonality. They’re like archaeological dig findings that refuse singular categorisation. Instead, each pile has a different style of label with a personal, creative text, avoiding any sense beyond that of the poets: ‘Yes, me’ runs one, ‘skim stones formed by clapping hands’ another.
Similarly, all of Newby’s artworks have these lively poetic titles that open them out to social energy out there in the everyday.
The lower gallery is almost entirely covered by an oceanic blue compacted layer of screed, as if the floor flooded and sediment dried. From the gallery high above, it could be a global surface, or zooming in, from Waiotapu on the Volcanic Plateau. Standing on it, there’s the interactive pleasure of a walk on a coastal rock shelf.
Yet closer things are more culturally complex – scoured with marks, it’s more evocative of shifting furniture than geological forces. Embedded in one place are silver cast fizzy drink can tops and needles. It’s a precious rough abstract painting you can not only scuff but which heightens your experience of the world outside.