Small and Key features eleven artists and media as diverse as glass, ceramic, photography, painting and drawing. It conclusively demonstrates that the small form is fundamental to each artist’s practice.
Joanna Braithwaite paintings are at once studies and narrative expositions, where core ideas and concepts are developed. Lorene Taurewera builds acute, speculative, haunting observations into character portraits that vibrate off the canvas into the viewer’s head space. Garry Currin implies and tricks and commands in ways that are unique, enthralling and very surprising, reminding us of the adage that in order to see first you must look and then look again.
Stephen Bradbourne’s new murine glass forms demonstrate a commanding array of technical skills and a wonderful colourist’s sensibility. Simon Edwards authoritatively develops fugitive atmospheres in a new mixed media approach. Wayne Barrar presents the poetic contrasts of light and dark, using this central device as a metaphor about our environmental stewardship.
Reuben Paterson explores abstracted rhythms, using portions of design and pattern as suggestive – culturally loaded - devices. John Parker’s famously understated ceramic objects utilise ascending/descending visual rhythms whilst simultaneously occupying and defining (positive and negative) space in multiple ways.
Andy Leleisi’uao’s hieroglyphic tales of heaven and hell, work and leisure, traverse time and place in never ending parables of human endeavour. Michael Hight uses a silhouette technique to isolate the mundane and ordinary and develop a surreal inflexion. Jenna Packer invents history, collapses time, connecting the improbable and impossible in ceaseless stories of cultural conflict that are also imbued with hope and possibility.