Wish You Were Here - Exhibition at Yvonne Rust Gallery - Whangerei

 

Wish you were here - june 2 -July 1 2023

New works by Whangārei art group, Collective Practise

Collective Practise is;

Heath Bell, Catherine Davies-Colley, Ros May, Alex Moyse, Angela Rowe, Leigh Tawharu, Linette van Greunen, Megan White, Julie Wood and Tracey Willms Deane

Yvonne Rust Gallery

2nd June to the 1st of July 2023

Opening 5-7pm Friday 2nd June

21 Selwyn Avenue, Avenues, Vinetown 0110

 

Wish you were here

by Angela Rowe

While on a solitary vacation by the ocean, the American writer and pioneering aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh unravels the complexities of her relationships and the roles and responsibilities she holds in her life through a series of thoughtful essays. This experience and its reflections became the 1955 memoir Gift from the Sea. Morrow Lindbergh had gathered a collection of seashells, and as she attentively described their form, structure, and the animal inhabitants’ behavioural characteristics, she reflected on the form of her own life. Each shell revealed a new insight or framework for how she contextualised herself, the passing of time, her exterior experience and the impact on her inner landscape.

Small gestures towards connection

While holding a solitary shell, Morrow Lindbergh confides in us that the bonds in relationships become more firmly established in the work that happens when we are apart from the ones we love. That our loves and attachments may be more profoundly felt in the spaces between togetherness. It is what we do at these times that matters, how we maintain our connections and nourish our relationships; when we make a gesture towards one another via a text, a call, an email, or a physical letter, postcard or note in a letterbox. In 2023, we may be more inclined to send a selfie, a meme or a photo of where we are than look for and buy a postcard. These messages might be private via a Messenger chat, or a public notice like an Instagram or Facebook post.

Our project Wish you were here, inadvertently began an exploration of these inner landscapes. We began thoughtfully wondering about our connections, the ‘spaces between’ ourselves and others, and the gestures towards connection that we may make. Alex Moyse played with the idea of sending a postcard back in time to her younger self, a little heads up when she needed it. If only we had the benefit of knowing that some things would be ok, in the long run. What would you say, if you could send one postcard to your younger self?

We considered the idea of a souvenir or ‘keepsake’, a vessel to hold the concept of a relationship, the memory of a friend or family member, and that connection to place; a triangulation of person, place and time. Leigh Tawharu’s work conjures the object as vessel, and plays with symbol and pattern, drawing a thread from textile and homewares, the comforts of home spilling onto the vases she stitches into. These images become imagined interior domestic landscapes that draw on nostalgia and our material experiences of textile, wallpaper patterns and cloth, calling to memory the people associated with them.

Taking the idea of the physical postcard even further, Megan White’s Impossible Postcards are composed of places and landscapes that have never existed. Like a living forest, her images are constantly in flux, her drawing and layering adding complexity that is present in the natural environment. The relationships between native and exotic plants is made more uncomfortable, confounding the problem of human intervention, while also creating a seductive image that we are drawn into.

Wish you were here

Linette van Greunen’s sculptural works invite you into a relationship similar to that Morrow Lindbergh opens up, following from van Greunen’s own engagement with her original collected specimens, her process of gathering and re-presenting draws us closer to the fine details of the landscape she inhabits. Van Greunen’s ceramic nest reminds us of the skills other animals possess in shaping their environment to meet their needs; in the words of Tim Ingold in Correspondences, “That is what it means to correspond, to join our lives with those of the beings, matter, and elements with whom and with which we dwell upon the earth.” In a similar fashion van Greunen creates works that correspond to her environment, deepening her understanding and knowledge of her landscapes.

Ros May’s use of symbolism and text directly connects with contemporary modes of communication and language, incorporating uncanny animals, short fragments of text, the passing thought to oneself (but never voiced aloud). May’s use of textiles and the welcome swallow connect with loved ones no longer with us, the embroidered swallow taken from a family textile. Textiles, like postcards, are objects held in the hand, and we encounter them daily and form - usually - unconscious relationships with them. May’s images are encased in resin, preserved and trapped in time, much like the animals present in her works, another reflection on the complicated relationship humans have with our environment and its other inhabitants.

Julie Wood draws on early memories of seaweed washed ashore, almost like ocean’s cast-offs, her work places value on this material reminding us that it is also a resource with culinary, practical or economic use. Thinking back to Morrow Lindbergh and the wisdom she found in spending time with seashells, Wood asks us to consider what gifts and messages are coming from the sea nowadays? Tracey Willms Deane’s prints on paper continue the conversation about communication and methods of connection, her prints of ancient and contemporary life forms alongside each other flattens time. Willms Deane also sees these traces and movements within the ocean currents as messages across, from and through the ocean. Messages which may not even be intended for us as humans, however they are able to be seen and received if you’re in the right place and time. By focusing on these ‘others’ that we live with, these artists start to unpack our fraught relationship with the wider world we inhabit, and what messages we might open our eyes to.

Terms of endearment

“I was interested in understanding postcards as a social technology...We have the same behaviors with social media that we did with postcards. We want personal connection.” Historian Lydia Pyne, notes of her research on the impact of the picture postcard on human behaviours and society.

As we talked about our experiences with postcards, and some of us began writing, sending and receiving them, we discovered much more complex ideas surrounding the etiquette of the handwritten card. The permanence of the text, including our spelling mistakes or grammatical errors either remain or are crossed out, there is no backspace, no discrete delete button. Catherine Davies-Colley decided to send all artists postcards from her travels, a deep dive into the technical aspects and micro decisions of penning a card to a friend or associate. How to address another artist or friend? Dear so and so, seems so old fashioned, especially with the predominance of text chat. How significant is the picture image, are we choosing a postcard based on the place or the person we are sending to?

The idea of the ‘postcard’ as a formal object is well familiar; a small physical representation of place, a not-quite-real, or just-too-perfect snapshot. One of many iterations and interpretations that form a story of a place and an experience had there. Heath Bell’s delicate sculptural forms, with messages floating within them, a collection of thoughts and fragments of poems, much like well worn old postcards or letters, the lines become less solid and more vulnerable with time. Similarly in my stitch works of shells, my own ‘gifts from the sea’ I look at the objects passed between the people I’m close to, the gestures towards connection and place. Stitched shells I’ve never held, but are stand-ins for the real thing.

As we all engaged in our work for this project, there was a process of turning inward, walking through our own interior landscapes and the spaces we make for ourselves, and that outward expression in our creative practice. I was reminded of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s insistence on cultivating a wholeness in ourselves while we experience the pulls towards family, children or work. That one must cultivate a full self to really offer value and substance to those around us, that we need to work with ourselves and others to expand our landscapes and for our ideas to grow.

The working title, ‘wish you were here’ at first seemed a little too cliché, and then ideas around loss and grief came into the conversation and I realised the postcard can reveal a lot about our relationships. How we treat the postcard or souvenir as an object, maybe we treasure one over others, some may be seen everyday, some kept safe in a drawer and looked at privately. A postcard may carry a random, unimportant message, of little long term significance, but is a trace of a small gesture towards connection. Wish you were here… thinking of you… with love.. Then there is the oneway nature of the postcard, a reply is not usually possible, but one trusts it will reach its destination.

 

Contacts

web: collectivepractise.wordpress.com/

email: collectivepractise@gmail.com

Heath Bell  heatherbellnz@gmail.com

Catherine Davies-Colley   cathdaviescolley@gmail.com

Ros May  roscraw@gmail.com

Alex Moyse   alexandra-lee@hotmail.com

Angela Rowe   angeladawnrowe@gmail.com

Leigh Tawharu   leightawharu@gmail.com

Linette van Greunen   linvg70@gmail.com

Megan White  megwhite.artanddesign@gmail.com

Julie Wood  jujuwood@gmail.com

Tracey Willms Deane   tracey.artinforms@gmail.com

Ngā mihi

Thank you Hannah Mitchell, Tracey Willms Deane and the team at Yvonne Rust Gallery

Many thanks to our families and friends, our tireless supporters!

Thank you to the WDC and the Creative Communities Scheme and SewEzi for making this project possible