Caught up in Circles features a suite of new works from three significant female artists:

Tori Beeche  |   Andrea Bolima  |  Marinda Vandenheede

Tori Beeche‘s paintings explore the link of memory to the physical spaces we occupy. In the tradition of Western genre painting, where a room becomes a site for inquiry, her practice examines the forces at play in the representation of an interior space. Utilising the basic compositional components of genre painting, such as a window, a mirror or a doorway melded with decorative elements and pattern motifs, to examine the influences we absorb and how the spaces we occupy shape our understanding of the world.

The paintings inhabit a spatial dimension that is formed by the social, emotional, and aesthetic narratives that the spaces we live in hold. Although she grew up in a suburb in Auckland, the narratives of her lived space were Scandinavian. From the décor of her family home to the social and emotional narratives of family life, her Norwegian father’s influence was profound. Childhood memories of stories and visits to her father’s homeland felt like fairy tales sparking her imagination and creating the lens of nostalgia that are layered into Tori’s paintings.

Constructing her paintings through a melding together of old black-and-white family snapshots, referencing flashes of coloured textile and decorative motifs that are in our memory-banks or imagined spaces from novels we have read. The canvas offers a space to re-negotiate history by connecting different locations in a heterotopian dimension. Asking how re-imagining our past could re-configure the present and, perhaps, re-kindle hope for the future.

____________________

‘Andrea Bolima’s paintings assert their physical presence but perhaps more importantly, they allow dreamy associations to be made in the paint. Bolima’s paintings sit in an ambiguous zone between abstraction and representation and as such one can find themselves in flux between ‘here’ and ‘there’, in focus and out of focus. Her paintings are led not so much by representation as sensation.

Inspired from memory and the natural world, Bolima paints ambiguous organic forms, areas of paint may resemble cloud currents in a sky scape or leaves and trees in a whimsical garden. Her forms are never explicit. Colour and active gesture spark the feeling of such places without letting go of a painterly materialism and abstract aesthetic. Through colour and form they remind us of unspecific places and moments that are simultaneously personal, private and universal.

For Bolima, colour precedes composition in process, fields of colour are applied before surface textured marks are applied. She will apply and mix colour directly on the canvas and in doing so, creates a site of change from which she can then respond to intuitively. A practice that is characterised by varying degrees of control and lack of control, spontaneity, play and intuition.’  (Benjamin Abdale-Weir, 2021)
____________________

Marinda Vandenheede creates sculptural objects, works on paper, and paintings that employ natural, used, and discarded materials. “I tend to work with weathered, natural materials that testify to the beauty of decay.” Such materials lend a sensitivity and sense of wonder to her works that contrast her use of lines and geometric forms Her paintings and drawings often contain a rough-edged, imperfect geometry combined with used paper and other repurposed surfaces – abstract, yet very much part of this world. Her objects border on the surreal as they repurpose recognizable worn and aging items and worldly fragments.

Vandenheede’s practice embraces imperfection, atrophy, and stillness. It is a rejection of perfection, disconnectedness, and consumerism. “I use discarded, out-of-use things that no longer meet the exacting standards of our Western society, giving them a new life as works of art.” Layers of time and narrative potential are embedded in her materials. She invites viewers to take a moment to be still and to take a deeper look.

Contact the gallery for a complete exhibition catalogue