Karen Greenslade, Carolyn Currie, Vicki Mangan
3 Mar 2022
27 Mar 2022
SEEING THE LINES
Through its responses to the physical landscape and natural elements of the Banks Peninsula, Seeing the Lines reframes the region’s native taonga by foregrounding it in the local environment and the art of this exhibition. In this group show at Stoddart Cottage Gallery, Karen Greenslade, Carolyn Currie and Vic Mangan seek to counter plant blindness, when plants exist as a backdrop to our lives and art prioritises the human figure. The artists have moved their collaborative art practices away from purely decorative floral vistas, to an engagement with the less obviously aesthetically engaging endemic plants of the place inhabited, reflecting the contemporary shift in concerns towards ecology and the local environment.
Artists have a role in bringing the natural world to the foreground of human attention, refocusing engagements as we cease to be the owners or viewers, and become the companions. Representations of plants in much traditional botanical art depicted them as either a source of good – exotic, fertile, abundant – or as tempting or dangerous. These works often reflected dominant cultural values and concerns. For example, many early colonial works embodied the era’s European view that regarded nature as raw, brutal and requiring control and civilisation, and New Zealand plants unsuitable for a domestic garden. The mixed media and print works in Seeing the Lines - we protect what we know, we know what we see, challenge such limiting perspectives, drawing attention to both the richness of the natural landscapes and native flora of the Banks Peninsula, and the current threats to their existence.