Miranda Parkes’ works quite literally take up space. Like plucky ballooning duvets, collapsing marquees, partially deflated beach balls or errant icebergs they crumple and lurch with a semi controlled recklessness out from their stretchers. The canvas is shaped, scrunched and contorted so as to barely resemble its two dimensional origins, and the viewer is invited to walk around this object which is part sculpture, part painting and explore the niches and crevices. They draw you in, but with titles that have included ‘Stalker’ perhaps it is they who are actually watching you.
Modernist painters such as Barnett Newman experimented with shaped canvases later in life that included canvases in the form of the letters L, N, M and T and polygon forms (Irregular Polygon series, 1960’s, and Eccentric Polygon series, 1970’s), but the shaped canvas is generally and primarily associated with colour field painter Frank Stella. More contemporary exponents and innovators in this field include Monica Prieto (whose paintings come out to meet the viewer) and Jessica Stockholder, whose installation works are conceptualised as paintings which have been blasted apart. Parkes, however, keeps one foot in each camp (painting and sculpture) so as to extend the dialogue in, and between each discipline. An idea she puts forward, that of surveillance, where the viewer is conceptualised as the object, offers a fresh interpretation and builds on the work of her artistic predecessors.
Parkes completed a MFA (University of Canterbury) in 2005, participated in Telecom Prospect 2007 (City Gallery, Wellington), and her work is held in private and public collections including the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu.
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