Stained Silences

June 8 - June 29, 2024


installation view - front gallery



installation view - front gallery



installation view - front gallery



installation view - front gallery



installation view - front gallery



installation view - front gallery



 installation view - back gallery



installation view - back gallery



 installation view - back gallery


 installation view - back gallery



 installation view - back gallery

 

Stained Silences is the latest project by one of Aotearoa’s most singular and committed artists, Pauline Rhodes. Stained Silences the first iteration, was installed in the Print Room at the then CSA (now CoCA) in 1981. 43 years on, the process of rusting materials, then placing, presenting and documenting them both outdoors and in, quietly continues. Here it is paper and ply that have been rusted in the main. Sometimes only lightly, and sometimes a much longer duration between steel sheets achieves intense and vivid effects. The process combines aspects of both chance and control. And it is a process that speaks of time embodied, realising surfaces ranging from the subtle to the rich and the luminous.
Be it rusted paper, ply, cotton fabrics or silk, a Pauline Rhodes installation feels consistently fluid, organic and contingent. Elements placed deliberately can be moved and recycled depending on site and intent. The ply panels here (some covered in rusted paper, some not) touch wall and floor. They could be tacked to float up a wall – poised but dense. Or, they might simply extend out along a floor.
Dramatic tripod-like forms hold stained silk in a clasp of wingnut and wood – the rusted bluish-black of the latter quiet against the resplendent fabric red. There is line and there is mass, and elements compressed alongside those, tensile and extended. Rusted cotton swathes almost float away. But there is (body) weight to the ground, a feeling of balance, stride and strength.

There are also works here in the back gallery, in which Rhodes sets herself a slightly un-Rhodes-like project: collaging over pre-prepared stretched canvases. The ripped rusted paper is sometimes grid-like in its cover, and sometimes more fluid or random in its arrangement. Ripped edges overlap, ghostly and pale. But always the paper is wrapped with care around the edges of the canvas, adding to the sense of objecthood that these thoughtforms bring to the wall. Then, floating (and falling through) these painterly rusted fields are lines salvaged from favourite texts irreparably damaged in Canterbury’s earthquakes. Described are ideas that link art to “new totalities of form and expression”, to social and political ambition as well as aesthetic form. Rhodes has obviously admired the work of Theodore Adorno, Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin, for example.
These works at their best feel quite sculptural. And importantly, flecks of colour punctuate these surfaces. There are reds, blues and yellow gold. Punctums of paint. Rhodes has always consistently registered the texture and colour of things. She dances through nature and also culture – a choreography that is majestic in its expanse and necessarily attentive in its detail. These are songs of silence – richly stained and inevitably mute.
JS

 

Installation details

 

 

 

 

Selected works on canvas

 

 

 

   




Installing...






Details of works