ELAM POST GRADUATE SHOW, ELAM B BUILDING, AUCKLAND
Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts Research Project
This painting and drawing project has focused on the use of the grid as a framework for engagement with spontaneous mark-making that is derivative of the natural environment. The grid acts as a surface structure, creating space, rhythm and pattern, despite it being an apparatus that imposes rules and repetition. The gestural marks are independent of the underlying system, defying and disrupting it, and dissolving any fixed perspective.
Research into the art historical paradox of the grid’s aesthetic possibilities for painting – as being both space and picture plane, spiritual and rational – has led to reflection on this modernist paradigm that extinguished chance, mysticism and nature in its utopian vision.
My reading into the grid as a Colonial construct lead me to research Re-wilding as a utopian idea, looking at indigenous knowledge systems and thinking about rejuvenenation and re-wilding of land.
Installation November 2018
Elam Post Graduate Show
Finalist in the National Contemporary Art Award, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, 2019
Jana Wood 