The Autumn Exhibition includes some rare works on paper (from the Imperfect Atmosphere Series) by Andrew Drummond (who will shortly have a major survey exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery). Like Drummond, Galia Amsel’s wedge-shaped glass sculptures and JS Parker’s textural extrapolations pursue abstract dialogues with reference to the physical world, presenting phenomena and event. Bruce Hunt does this too but his interlocking landscapes are obviously literal and achieve remarkable sensations of being up high, looking down and across through air which clearly has as much substance as the land itself. Neil Frazer’s adaptive use of an abstract painting technique to a representative subject has resulted in paintings which seem to have been chiselled directly from the real world.

Karl Maughan paintings achieve the wondrous status of taking the viewer inside the reality of a developed garden. And yet it is unmistakeable in Harrisons Line (2010) and Green Road (2007-10) that he is also equally determined to remind us that these are paintings.

Rebecca Harris’s use of symbolism, myth and the multi-faceted traditions of portraiture are incisive and really edgy. Megan Huffadine’s hand-built votive objects likewise have a symbolic language but one which obliges the viewer to search their own memory for meanings, clues, dreams, and values.

John Edgar (who recently exhibited at the National Museum of Scotland) explores the linear qualities of form and colour in Transformer (2007). In Element (2008) he establishes a remarkable contradiction of materiality with slices of black stone and clear glass side by side and then caps it with a fluid, organic, landscape motif.
The Autumn Exhibition also includes works on paper by Ralph Hotere and Stanley Palmer, glass vessels by Robyn Irwin and a suite of Paul Mason’s patina bronze crucibles.