NZ Listener, 13 December, 2015 ___ Who is the Alabaster Man: a monument or a sacrifice? He is buoyed on the shoulders of the crowd, his arms spread in the shape of the cross. Behind his head, a white picket fence and two-story house trim the hill, but this is […]
Art Writing
48 posts
Eyecontact, 29 November, 2015 ___ What is it that makes today’s dollhouses so different, so appealing? Emily Hartley-Skudder seems intent on finding out. I first noticed her petite paintings of dollhouses and still-life compositions of doll-sized trinkets and toys a couple of years ago. Too cliché? Ibsen. Mansfield. Barbie. The […]
Auction No.1 Catalogue, Bowerbank Ninow, 25 November 2015 ___ The spectre of JonBenét Ramsey haunts the maudlin Werta. Is Yvonne Todd’s subject another moribund child beauty queen? Werta’s blue banner, orange pallor and backcombed hair foster a sense of misplaced pageantry. Her demure eyes meet the viewer’s gaze. Werta […]
Art + Object Catalogue, Important Paintings and Contemporary Art Auction, 2015 ___ The northeast and southeast trade winds meet at the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone known by sailors as the doldrums. In the doldrums when the prevailing winds are calm sailing boats can be trapped at sea for days or […]
Creamy Psychology Opening, City Gallery Wellington, 2014 ___ “That’s quite Yvonne Todd”, a staff member said. I looked up. It was 2010 and I was out the back of the then Borders store on Lambton Quay loading books onto a trolley. The staff member didn’t realise she was in the […]
Yvonne Todd: Creamy Psychology (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014). ___ “Long ago and oh so far away,” Karen Carpenter sings. Her voice swells, fills the song with far more longing than the lyrics contain. She sounds so ‘sweet and pure’, but she’s not really here; it’s just YouTube. Karen Carpenter […]
A Single Hurt Colour, reading, Litcrawl, November 2014 ___ In 2012 I was picked up from the Dunedin airport by a driver holding a sign: Megan Dunn and Jim and Mary Carr. I thought the sign was pretty funny. I had never met Jim or Mary but I knew they […]
New Revised Edition catalogue, City Gallery Wellington, 2013 ___ Little Gem Consider the lettuce (Lactuca sativa). It is good for you. Healthy. A lettuce is not calorific. Commonly associated with salads and slugs, the lettuce is a humble vegetable, first cultivated by the ancient Egyptians, who turned it from a […]
New Zealand listener, 26 Apr 2014 ___ In 1984 the first person died from an Aids related condition in New Zealand. Homosexuality was illegal. It would be another two years before the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was passed in 1986. Condoms were still primarily associated with the prevention of pregnancy; […]
NZ Listener, 23 August, 2014 ___ “My earliest memories are of growing up on a dairy farm in Takanini, just south of Auckland. One of my earliest memories is my father sawing horns off some cows; my father trapping hawks in a gin trap to protect the ducks on the […]
Off the Wall, Arts Te Papa, 2014 ___ The weave of the burlap is coarse as corduroy. The sun is boiling brown, surrounded by a white ring. The circle is the shape that completes this composition: the two gourd-like heads of Adam and Eve, their unequal eyes. Eve has blue […]
Art News, Autumn 2014 ___ “I think it’s about worry,” Nick Austin paused. “I think it’s about bad news.” Austin held the microphone at a right angle. “I think it’s about worrying about bad news.” Austin looked at his painting of a shark fin, inside the window of an envelope. […]