First critique - April 2021

Since February 2021 I have been researching and painting the local Limeworks in Kaiwaka. This site is a place I can explore ideas that interest me concerning edges, environment, equity, space/place and mapping.

I took all manner of experiments down to Auckland to show my peers. Many were not going to fly in my opinion but the advice was to take them all and gauge how others would respond. Most of these were experimental in nature.

There were paintings, ready-made collages and works on paper. It's early days in the MFA and now is the time to test out ideas.

I asked for a 'cold crit' for the first round. I was in the room but the work had to speak for itself. No clues were given until midway through the session when I handed out a statement.

In the second crit later in the week I introduced the works and handed out a statement at the beginning.

Having an educated group of peers and supervisors describe their reactions to the work was enlightening. It helped me to cull the work and edit my ideas. Their comments gave me real-life feedback about how the paintings would be understood. They saw the relationship between all the work to the subject matter of the Limeworks.

Comments that resonated for my practice included:

- chalky, ghostly, metaphysical aspects

- layering, revealing and concealing

- movement, rhythms

- knowing the place and being guided by the materials

- geometry speaks to mapping

- landscapes with hints of industry

Points made for me to think about: I'm painting the Limeworks in Kaiwaka, yet there is nothing in these works that identified the place specifically. Questions came up about what it means to be a local? Being local means more specificity. I don't consider myself to be a local yet - perhaps that is why they are so generic.

It was suggested they are too generic and there is room for further development of my own, specific language around the mark making. Good examples here include layering, lines and glazing to get a whitewash look.

My first thoughts are that adding more local specificity of place into the work will make them too prosaic. I am aiming for a more ethereal, metaphysical interpretation of the site. For me they could be any lime quarry - where the substrate is made up of dead matter, calcified into sedimentary rock. Ghostly. But I agree, there is certainly room for more specificity of mark making. To make my own mark. This is an area to work on.

The 3 paintings below were, for me, the most successful. I will be returning to using rock stock paper in future work. It is made of limestone and speaks about the limestone.

In Praise of Limestone

Quarry

Oolites

Since then I have walked around the site and photographed it.

During the second critique I told the group about the 2008 lion sighting up behind the limeworks quarry. The headline read: 'Kaiwaka in an Uproar'. I love the thought of painting this lion (who may have been an escapee from the troubled Zion Lion Park in Northland). But is it a delight or a distraction?

After I'd visited the quarry I decided I would paint that big cat, even just to get him out of my system. The photograph below is a mixed media work on paper and digitally rendered lion. It was around this time that I started reading about 'Pataphysics...