“When Shoe leaves Foot.”
Nick Austin and Helen Maudsley
6 Mar → 2 Apr 2015
Gallery 1
When Shoe leaves Foot. brings together the work of Helen Maudsley and Nick Austin into conversation with one another.
Austin offers up an array of deceptively simple representations of humble objects for this exhibition: a map, a box and an incomplete crossword. We access the symbology of these images as fragments, a narrative in which Austin has withheld some of the key plot points. In contrast, Maudsley floods her paintings a complex web of morphing objects and forms that provide a web of reflections on the human psyche that the viewer is encouraged to explore.
Rich and highly individual is the graphic language that floats in and out of Maudsley’s paintings, this is supplemented by her paragraph-long artwork titles that inform the visual analogies that occur in her paintings.
Nick Austin lives in Dunedin and holds an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and a BVA from Auckland University of Technology. He was a member of the artist-run gallery Gambia Castle which operated in Auckland from 2007 – 2010. In 2012 he was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin.
Helen Maudsley’s work is tightly organised within the picture rectangle, with many drafts made beforehand to ensure the minimum of amendments are needed in the work itself. In her drawings, shapes are constructed from thin lines and cross-hatching, shadowing worked up through dense webs of short pen strokes. Patterns are formed through repeated shapes and in the fine cross-hatching. From this, images of visual references are used as visual analogy.