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Anna Muirheadgraduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2003, majoring in Sculpture and returned to the Otago Polytechnic School of Art to complete a Masters in Fine Art in 2008. She won the Margaret Stoddart Award in 2007 and was the recipient of the William Hodges Fellowship in 2008. Invercargill-born Muirhead is living and working in China where she teaches art and continues with her own practice.
Having worked in a variety of media including soil and plants, wood, vinyl and recycled cardboard, Muirhead is currently working on recycled linoleum. Drawing in pencil straight onto the back of the linoleum, building up her image sometimes over the course of weeks, Muirhead then uses hand tools to remove any superfluous material and thus reveal her design one painstaking cut at a time. Her work is both innovative and technically-demanding. The results are stunning. Once the cutting away has been completed, her lino cuts are then framed between panes of glass literally providing us with windows to alternate realms. Recently, however, she has also produced free-hanging works which cast fine almost filigree-like silhouettes on to the wall and floor. Essentially, Muirhead’s works are multi-dimensional with the interplay of light and shadow providing a further dimension to a sculptural artwork.
In her most recent body of work, Muirhead supplies us with glimpses into floriferous summer gardens. These finely detailed and deceptively elegant works have a clarity which reminds us of those crisp summer mornings captured by New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield in the opening paragraphs to “At the Bay” (1921), where she describes the garden just before the sun has risen and the dew still lying like a pearlescent blanket on the blue grass. Needless to say, for both Muirhead and Mansfield, gardens carry hidden meanings; on the one hand, they are private sanctuaries, on the other, they bear testament to human desire to tame and cultivate natural environments. In China Muirhead has been particularly affected by the industry that surrounds her; gardens and botanical imagery (in books for example) provide her with some reprieve from this proverbial concrete jungle. Her art is, therefore, a reconciliation of the urban and the natural.
Artist Statement:The work continues with past ideas of domesticated spaces such as the garden. In this instance, I am focusing on areas that are transformed almost immediately from countryside to new suburbs. The source images of the trees in this particular work are grown in the countryside specifically to beautify newly developed areas, and paradoxically (as the development erases any evidence of what comes before it) gives the new area, when relocated, a sense of history and time.
Trans-plantis not just about China or a commentary on Chinese development. [It is not] my intention … to comment or judge as an outsider on Chinese politics or use of space. I am, however, inserted into a system that I do not entirely understand, as I have little knowledge of language and local histories.
Trans-plant [evokes] ideas [about] time, domestication, immediacy, labour, change, and [what it means to] be foreign.
Muirhead explains that in addition to New Zealand artist Fanny Osborne's botanicals, which have long provided initial source images, she has also utilised both her own and others’ photographs and various images of China and other Asian countries such as Cambodia. “These include botanical images, building sites, cranes, transplanted trees etc. It may blur definition of specific plants and images rendering the image and location undefined and abstracted” (Anna Muirhead, Feb. 2012).
Muirhead has been exhibiting throughout New Zealand and in Australia since 2005 and her work is held in private collections in New Zealand and abroad. More recently, Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Invercargill, acquired one of Muirhead’s works for their public collection.
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Anna Muirhead
Trans-plant (2011/12)
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Anna Muirhead
detail of Trans-plant (2011/12)
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Anna Muirhead
detail of Trans-plant (2011/12)
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Anna Muirhead
Cranes (2011/12)
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Anna Muirhead
detail of Cranes (2011/12)
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Anna Muirhead
detail of Cranes (2011/12)
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image: Mangroves |
image: Mangroves |
image: Mangroves |
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Anna Muirhead
Mangroves (2011-12)
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Anna Muirhead
detail of Mangroves (2011-12)
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Anna Muirhead
detail of Mangroves (2011-12)
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Christchurch-based Katie Thomas attained her Bachelor of Fine Art in 1994 and returned to New Zealand’s preeminent Ilam art school, to complete her Masters in Fine Art in 2011. Thomas is both a painter and a sculptor who during the past decade has utilised a variety of materials including wood, old books and transparent industrial resin to produce works which defy concrete categorisation. These include sculptural, wall-mounted works within which fibres and various found objects are encased between layers of resin resulting in multi-dimensional and seductive pieces which invite close-up investigation; such scrutiny reveals an assortment of individual components, including fragments of text, which appear to float within their honey-tinted, rich and glossy encasements.
In 2006 the artist exploited the purl-stitch motif in mixed media works that Warwick Brown notes are both sinuous and rhythmic (Seen This Century 2009, p.358). Similarly, Jonathan Baker explains how this knitted weave motif lent the composition structure, so that the eye was led on a coherent and lyrical journey over the pictorial surface (ibid.).
Since 2008, Thomas has returned to drawing and painting, producing large scale works in which delicate and luminescent woven trails of colour merge and overlap – and thus represent a continuation of the knitting theme.
Artist Statement: As an abstract painter the use of a motif can establish helpful parameters when constructing a painting. The fluid geometric nature of knitting, as such, provides an organic "grid" which can be manipulated to suggest movement and dimension and in my current body of work this device continues as a vehicle for my explorations.
My concern with pictorial space is revealed in simultaneously flat and densely layered compositions, where the space becomes ambiguous. In this simultaneity I am hoping to maintain a level of viewer attention that extends beyond immediate and simplistic reading. The use of colour is another key component and my interest is very much in the optical relationships set up by the juxtaposition and interweaving of often disparate colours. I am hoping this combination of "soft" and "loud" evokes an atmosphere that is, at once, harmonious and lively. I have attempted to translate my love of paint, of surface and of the process of making, into paintings that are alive and optimistic (Katie Thomas, 2011).
In her most recent works, the image of peonies, the skeletal and sinuous forms of trees, amoebae, and other beautiful organic forms slowly reveal themselves within the compositions. Soft washes and drips of colour on large scale canvases are reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s practice while Thomas’s very gestural painterly style nods also to Jackson Pollock. Recently, critics have noted the synergy between Thomas’s work and aboriginal art (particularly Fred Williams) and indeed, their respective works are richly narrative. There is also a Monet-like quality in Thomas’s work as evidenced in the subtle hues and adherence to Impressionism’s suggestive use of light and privileging of the elusive and the ephemeral. There is cohesion and structure too though; thus, Andrew Paul Wood, while he notes the dynamism of Thomas’s lively painterly style which subtly suggests the influence of Vorticism, points to Mondrian’s formal abstraction which has provided a starting point – the grid – on which Thomas’ fluid and expressive painterly style flourishes (see Katie Thomas Catalogue MFA 2011, p. 3). The titles Thomas gives her work provide further insight into the compositions – for example, October and Autumn – and demonstrate how closely tied her practice is to Nature’s cycles.
Catalogue Essay: Melissa C. Reimer (Feb. 2012)
Exhibition curated by M. C. Reimer, Hannah Steven, Norma Dutton & Peter Gregg
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Katie Thomas
A Place For Birds (2010)
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detail of A Place For Birds (2010) |
detail of A Place For Birds (2010) |
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Katie Thomas
Painting by Ear- Tribute to Esbjorn Svensson (2011)
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detail of Painting by Ear ... |
detail of Painting by Ear ... |
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Katie Thomas
Lifted (2011)
Dipytch [2 panels]
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detail of Lifted |
detail of Lifted |
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Katie Thomas
October (2010)
Dipytch [2 panels]
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detail of October |
detail of October |
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