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Otago Daily Times

Art seen, July 17th

"Land. Form.", Joanna Dudson Scott and Sara Scott (Moray Gallery) "Land. Form." at Moray Gallery is an intriguing collaborative exhibition by two (unrelated) artists, ceramicist Sara Scott and painter Joanna Dudson Scott. The two artists have both been inspired by landscape forms in their works, with a centrepiece of the exhibition being Joanna's large asymmetrical canvas Pudding Hill. This is also the only work to address the landscape in a realistic rather than impressionistic or conceptual way. From Pudding Hill and from the landscape itself, Sara has produced a series of impressive ceramic vessels, each using a parabola as the basic form, evoking the hills and rivers of the land with horizontal washes of glaze. The surfaces have been left rough, allowing the glaze to become its own terrain, with pock-marks and rivulets imitating the natural marks on the land. From these vessels, Joanna has taken one step further removed from the landscape, using Sara's ceramics seen within a surrounding of stones and washes of colour as the subjects of her paintings. Through reduction and repetition, we are left with an essence of the land that lies beyond its basic topography, while at the same time we are able to grasp the complex relationship between the two media, paint and clay. "Tide's Return", David Green (RDS Gallery) David Green's "Tide's Return" fills and flows from RDS Gallery. The display, a 30-minute video loop, is viewed from outside. The art space glows and flows with blue and green waters, their tides moving across the walls, floor, and ceiling. The perception, of a submerged room, is alienating, disconnecting us from our expectations of a world where land is land and sea is sea. After dark, the display spills out of the gallery, illuminating Cumberland Street and beyond it, parts of Anzac Square and the Railway Station. It is at this point that the visual disassociation takes on a deeper and more poignant meaning. The station, a jewel in Dunedin's crown, sits on reclaimed land; the site of the RDS gallery is close to the original shoreline. In this age of the panic over rising sea levels, we are faced with the ghost of Dunedin still to come, one in which our central plain with its grand stately buildings is again submerged beneath the waters. In this, the dissonance becomes an all-too-real danger. The installation challenges us to think about life beyond Antarctica's great melt and not just what it will mean to the world in some abstract sense that is too soon disregarded, but what it will mean to us as individuals. "Fly Fly Away", Jacque Ruston (Pieces) Ceramicist Jacque Ruston has her first solo exhibition in several years at Port Chalmers' Pieces, a new combination fashion and art space on Beach Street. Ruston's art consists of a series of ceramic caricature busts, all done in a semi-naive style vaguely reminiscent of fellow local Jim Cooper. Clay characters gurn and pout in Ruston's works and their deliberate half-glazed rough-and-readiness gives them life and charm. Alongside, and sometimes incorporated with, the busts are a series of ceramic chains, these items suggest the human condition, permanently chained to our routines, is unbreakably bound to the rest of humanity. Ruston's works add an intriguing element with their experimental home-made glazes, often created by the simple expedient of adding bits of broken glass to the surface of her pieces before firing. The artist notes that living within the university's student flatting area means that finding broken bottles is depressingly easy and the different colours of glass add interesting streams and flows to her finished works. Despite the busts' organic, gently comic nature, there is a keen awareness of art history in many of the pieces — ancient Mediterranean sculptures and Brueghel's grotesques amalgamating and merging into joyfully irreverent finished forms.