PAULINE RHODES – Stained Silences – 19 Sept-6 Oct 2017

Pauline Rhodes has created a site-specific installation in the gallery

Artist statement:   ‘The performative working materials involve a unique process of imprinting and staining with iron oxides. The materials are part of an accumulation of working sculptural elements, which can respond to a wide range of spatial situations.

The time consuming process of staining began in 1973 in order to extend the steel being worked with into lightweight and portable materials. Unprinted newspaper was used at first, as it was economical. Later this was extended into a wide variety of materials such as canvas, silk, wood and stone. The slow natural process of staining, using only the essentials of air, water and iron, afforded cohesion between the materials and contrasted with the quick application of the green painted surfaces.

The transitory, ongoing nature of the projects has extended over long period of time. They have worked through various current ideas and attitudes, and have responded to extending spatial outdoor situations and to the contrasting confined spaces of indoors.

 “To leave a stain upon the silence” – Samuel Beckett’

    

    

         

Pauline Rhodes was born in Christchurch. She has lived in Nigeria and England, and in 1974 she completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at The University of Canterbury. Rhodes was the first recipient of the Olivia Spencer Bower Award in 1987.

She first exhibited at the CSA (now CoCA) in 1977. Since then an integral part of her practice has been working on installations that relate to the landscape, in two distinct forms: outdoor works that create minimal interventions in the environment, captured by Rhodes’ documentation, and interior installations relating to the concepts of the outdoor works. She is highly regarded as one of New Zealand’s most senior and leading site-specific installation artists.

When talking about her oeuvre Rhodes often refers to the words ‘intensum’ and ‘extensum’. Made from an amalgum of the words intensive/extensive/summation, they refer to an open-ended expanding and closed or concentrated states.

Her work has been exhibited in a wide range of New Zealand galleries, including ‘Possibilities and Impossibilities’ (2014) and ‘King Tides Rising’ (2008) at The Physics Room, Christchurch, ‘New Twists’ (2008) Bowen Galleries, Wellington, ‘Gathering Intensities’ (2006) Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, in Sculpture on the Gulf, Waiheke Island in 2007 and 2009, and SCAPE Public Art Christchurch Biennial in 2000 and 2015.