Chris Charteris: Te Mahi a te Mea An Abundance of Things

Wonderfully enlivened by textures and contrasts, cultural pluralities and the implied presence of the human body (especially that of the chest, head and shoulders), Chris Charteris’ chains of stones are necklaces of love and identity.

Imbuing his works with grace and authoritative delicacy, combining time past and new, Charteris builds multiple visual layers and narratives. His ‘lightness of touch’ is such that the materials do all the talking and the rhythms built are not simply colour coded but spiritual in nature. The structure of the materials themselves and the musical characteristics, the rising and falling sensations each necklace individually contain and express, come to animate each work quite differently.

Possessing a jeweller’s eye, a sculptor’s command of scale and a unique cultural breadth, Charteris assembles narratives of journeys and cultural signifiers. Their plurality is deeply informed by a Pacific ethos, where time is marching back and forth, where history becomes the present and vice versa. The astonishing five-stranded A Gift from Tangaroa at its simplest is an interlaced stacking of pāua shell and stone. It evokes the sea, the passages of time and place. It has an array of sounds which are further augmented by the optical delights and myriad consequences of light playing in and upon the shells. It is a remarkable sonata of place and being. And utterly beautiful.

In the single strand works Spinning, Drifting and Rolling Through Time, A Sense of Wonder and In the Endless Cycle of Returning into Sand Charteris stands further back, letting the energy of the repeated patterns and materials arise.

In the more sculptural and explorative Te Mahi a te Mea and Anchored we witness Charteris’ cultural dexterity and his preparedness to explore form whilst introducing broader, clearly Pacific contexts and histories.

Chris Charteris wants the materiality of each work to do all the talking. In the three andesite wall-mounted stone tablets we see again the dynamics of repeated rhythms, pattern and shape. These works reach beyond the boundaries of themselves by virtue of Charteris’ renowned, very astute, assured carving.