Artist's Statement
Insects and Memories Series
Just as a butterfly is caught and preserved in a specimen box, so do we capture our experiences and archive them as our memories.
I’m happy if people simply enjoy these works visually, but there are layer on layer of associations, references and meanings in each work when they are complete. One person called them “memory boxes” and they are all about memory and identity. We are all collectors of memories, experiences, sensations, fragments of days that layer us up and make us who we are.
I grew up playing in the bush at the bottom of our sprawling garden and in the creek. Apparently it was where my parents could always find me, any weather, any time of day! Nature and insects have always had a fascination for me. They exhibit a vast range of colours, shapes, beautiful patterns and quirky, amazing life cycle facts. For example the Puriri Moth pupa spends five -seven years in a 7-shaped tunnel in the trunk of a tree and then emerges as a beautiful moth to fly for only one day. One day! They exhibit such an endless range of colurs, shapes, beautiful patterns and peculiar life styles and so the series continues to grow.
I began with the Monarch Butterfly which just seemed a natural fit with the oranges of the Sure to Rise packaging. The Cicada has a radio tuner painted on to its abdomen as we used to catch them in our cupped hands and listen to them sing, pretending they were radios. My Giant Weta holds two rayguns designed by Greg Broadmore (with his approval ) of Weta Workshop. Wetas have been around since the Mesozoic era. They watched the dinosaurs come and go. They are living fossils in archaic yet futuristic armour so I’m attempting to portray the weta as a timeless creature, hopefully blazing on, though they are now sadly endangered.
I create the original insect with a mixture of collage and drawing. I then individually screen print each insect on to paper or house boards and then handpaint them. The work is completed by being labelled and framed as if archived in a museum boxed collection.
The use of weatherboards started as a play on the 1950s trend of having a big, bright butterfly decorating a weatherboard house and is an integral part of the work. As this is set in a particular time and place, it led me to develop the artwork as museum collections, archived in a social and historical context, and then to layer other personal references, or iconic images in with collage and word, in the notes. I like working on the old boards. Often a beautiful aged board dictates the insect I use. I love the idea of upcycling boards of homes, villas, with layers of lives lived within their walls.
There is a lot of work that goes in to each individual insect and the work as a whole. The aged and organic nature of the weatherboard presents its challenges when screenprinting by hand. I love that unpredictable nature of the process and the fact that each print is distinctive from the next. As each insect collection is on a different set of boards, no two will be the same. They have got to be as close to a unique, one-off artwork as a print can be.
A significant source of inspiration has been the Auckland Museum and the natural history and entomology departments there. I think the collections there are so, so beautiful and I can spend ages looking over them. They are about the natural specimen and the human input of the collector- some from over a century ago and the social context of that time. I also consider the tension between containment and preservation, freedom and security; collective and personal memory.
I have included a table, Collector’s Table, in to this exhibition (sic 'Collections' exhibition at The Lane Gallery) which is a natural development of my work. My ‘memory boxes’ are evolving into ‘wonder tables’ and ‘cabinets of curiosities’ along the lines of ‘wunderkammer’.
“Wunderkammer”: during the Renaissance learned and wealthy men collected works of art, natural phenomena, scientific and technical objects in cabinets of curiosities or a series of rooms. It was intended to reflect the owner’s encyclopaedic knowledge and was not governed by rules of categorization- just jumbled intuitively, wonderfully together.
I love the idea of retaining a sense of wonder in the world.