A couple of years ago a girlfriend said to me over a Pint, “You know what I’d like you to write about next?” “No.” I sipped my beer, wiped the froth from my lips. “God,” she announced. God is a painting by Julian Hooper that I recently fell in love […]
Art Writing
47 posts
I woke up the other morning, started scrolling my phone, and landed on an image of a gigantic Blue Ted roaming the flaxen countryside. Blue Ted had an enormous head and a rotund belly, but from his bright blue furry arms protruded human hands and from his blue furry legs […]
What’s art got to do with it? is the loose title —thanks Tina Turner—that I cribbed for my occasional art segment on RNZ’s Saturday morning show with Kim Hill. I discuss the intersection of art and life, hoping to look at art beyond gallery walls when possible. Worshipping art: on […]
This is the talk I gave for Speakers Corner: Art for Art’s Sake at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2022. Today I am going to tell you about: a picklea piece of paperand a hinge. But first I am going to tell you about nothing. I once gave an old […]
The pencil was on loan from Waitakere College. It wasn’t until I was tapping the model’s redhead with it—as though she was an egg I might crack—that I felt things were working. The pencil became the irritant. As writing is often an irritant for me. Each point bearing down on […]
The Spinoff, March 21, 2019 On a Sunday afternoon I opened my laptop and sat in In Transit, the most ambitious and nimble exhibition on in the country right now. If the Doozers from Fraggle Rock got unlimited access to stainless steel pipes and a really good welder they might have made the current installation at […]
New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press). ___ Are these dancers holy fools and if so what does that make us? Francis Upritchard first exhibited Dancers as part of her pavilion, Save Yourself, at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Three tables of handmade figures, including Dancers, were presented in […]
New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press). ___ Does this artwork deserve to be called a ‘wanker’? Well, it is nothing if not colourful. Four rows of crosses shake and shudder within their lattice boxes. The oil paint has a slapdash appeal, each stroke thick and lustrous as though it […]
Art News New Zealand, Spring 2018 ___ These are the facts: in 2017 artist Sriwhana Spong travelled to the ruins of Disibodenberg monastery in Germany. She had three days to film her new work. “I didn’t know what to expect but I quickly realised the site had become a […]
Art News New Zealand, 2018 ___ Chris Sharp is an American curator, who first studied French Literature and wanted to be a novelist. “What novel would you like to have written?” I asked when Sharp visited Wellington on Creative New Zealand’s Te Manu Ka Tau/Flying Friends programme. “Spanking the Maid […]
New Zealand Books, 2018 ___ Did you realise that artist Theo Schoon, best known for his modernist photographs of rippling mud pools, also performed Balinese dance? Have you heard of the Prague-born architect Imric Porsolt, once the art critic for the Auckland Star, his writing so biting and insightful that […]
In 2017, I curated a wordy little show of works by Nick Austin and Christina Read called The Thought that Counts for McLeavey Gallery. I also co-wrote a dinky little book with the artist and writer Evangeline Riddiford Graham to accompany the show. Y’know sometimes it is hard to give […]