Studio 18D 2024

Roger Mortimer’s compelling tapestries are part-map, part-illuminated chart, part-interior monologue which traverses back and forth across multiple times and places. "Different and divergent memories" are juxtaposed, the presence and stylistic conventions of medieval manuscripts are harnessed, in a multi-layered conversation which reaches deeply into the literary narratives of Dante while also spilling up and out of it. We see ‘a cultural cartography,’ events in progress, experiences underway, where a very particular "New Zealand psyche," a "unifying DNA" and "connective identity" is witnessed in process.1

Central to Jenna Packer’s paintings has been a narrative where time is collapsed, where vignette moments of a complicated, contested, history are depicted. In that manner, Packer has demonstrated how the "local" has been determined and affected by aberrant, selfish, behaviour and the geo-politics of capitalism’s mendacity, its rite of ceaseless consumption and territorial avarice. In this new series of notably optimistic works, we see a wallpaper-like archipelago of islands, comprised of "small idealised scenes"2 strongly suggestive of the Pacific, where metaphors of interconnectedness emerge. Significant messages of hope and faith are delivered by the bright, warm palette, blooming flowers and the pervasive rhythms of pattern.

Emphatic realism, tinged with elements of intrigue and developing mystery, and a celebration of the mundane urban environments where we witness time’s inexorable passages amongst a self-evident nostalgia for cars of the 1980s and ‘90s, posits Elliot Love’s paintings in a well-known tradition. What sets him apart is a rare compositional command (the role performed by the pervasive rhythm of thirds, for example), a soft, deft tonal dexterity and understated symbolism.

In a new suite of works, Ripple Effect, Russell Moses explores the triptych form as he calls for peace in the world and responds to the war in Ukraine, the tragedy of Gaza and the consequences of climate change. Imbued with significant structural and architectural presence, plus sensations of landscape filled with the serendipity of light as well as the fugitive modulations of it, these new works significantly extend Moses’ conversations about the formal values of colour-field abstraction. Shimmering and luminescent, the vibrations and ambiences of rippling water and fractured light produce wondrous ever-altering melodic harmonies.

In three new works extending his recent Identity series, Nigel Brown continues to explore nurture and the intersection between humankind and the natural world. Using the pathos of loss and increments of doubt, Brown reminds us that the ruru, part-tohunga, part-guide, is a portal between darkness and light, linking the material and spiritual worlds.

1. Corentin Celbert-Chaudet, “Inside the Mind of Roger Mortimer” in Apocrypha: The Maps of Roger Mortimer, Index, Auckland, 2021, p. 35.
2. Jenna Packer, Artist Notes, email correspondence, February 8, 2024.