BLUE FLEUR: Airy and Articulate exhibition opening
Sandra Bushby & Natalie Guy
Opening: 5pm, Wednesday 24 April
Artist talk: 12pm, Friday 26 April
Bushby and Guy come together as two women artists with an admiration of each other’s work. Their interest in a joint project was spurred by a discussion of the sense of atmosphere they recognised in each other’s works and the realisation that they both draw upon literary sources for inspiration.
In Blue Fleur: Airy and Articulate, a second iteration exhibition which derives its title from the poem by Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003), Sandra Bushby and Natalie Guy respond to poetic language across boundaries of medium, opening the edges between the materiality of language, emergent painting processes, and stained glass as a vessel for sculptural translation.
Joanna Margaret Paul’s poetry collection Like Love Poems was chosen for its expressive symbolism of space and colour. The artists feel these qualities are physically manifested in Paul’s painted series Stations of the Cross (c. 1971), for St Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Port Chalmers. They recognise that Paul crosses boundaries in her use of materiality, as the fresco surface is juxtaposed with the translucency of the stained-glass windows in the chapel. Her dense, matte paintings which are spare in colour operate as a kind of window with its own sense of transparency, eliciting spiritual contemplation within the religious setting.
