By the Light of the Moon - Vakavulavula

As the moon and the sea are intertwined in their movements, so too in this exhibition, Claudia Jowitt allows sculptural force, and the three-dimensional, to pull on her two-dimensional painted surfaces. Similarly her conceptual concerns – an ongoing investigation of the feminine in art and the insertion of place into abstraction – continue to interact.

Here, the place is the Moana, the ocean which binds the Pacific, and Jowitt’s Pakeha and Fijian heritage. Here as viewers, we dive perhaps into the corals of her multi-layered surfaces which in this exhibition have stepped into a more sculptural realm. That step is reinforced with the inclusion of small sculptures which speak to the gestures and forms of the paintings – with the gallery wall itself, in installation, becoming the painting substrate. Continuing with the sense of swimming analogy, the works offer an easy glide between painting/sculpture or sculpture/painting, moving us in some strangely crafted new powerfully feminine sea.

Claudia Jowitt completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 2015. She has also studied at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Fine Arts in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2016, she was the inaugural Tautai Pacific Arts Trust Artist in Residence at the Dunedin School of Art. She has been exhibiting since completing her undergraduate degree at AUT in 2009 and was included in an exhibition of four Pacific women artists at Enjoy in Wellington earlier this year. She has work in the University of Auckland and Wallace Collections as well as in many private collections.