Ideas for the Final Show.

Ruth Buchanan’s installation (or sculpture), currently showing at Te Papa, is an arrangement of the curtains that she has used in previous works. I like the layers, visual layers, but also the histories that these curtains have and bring with them. I like how the overall arrangement looks like an abstract painting, like a Mondrian grid. I like the translucency of the work, how you can look through to the window and see life continuing outside. (from Instagram post) - The title connects themes of lineage, priorities, and the world through the metaphor of a door or window, referencing both her own biography and the history of the site where the work is displayed, https://www.instagram.com/te_papa/p/DPu8d9Kjupx/

Ruth Buchanan, He ārai whakapapa, he matapihi ki te ao | Priorities, whakapapa | Or, Door, window, world…

(from my essay) Judy Millar, in discussion with Jarrett Earnest in 2023, describes every painting as a PROPOSITION. Influenced by many readings of The Shape of Time by George Kübler, she enjoys the concept of Kübler’s non-linear take on art history, in which painting is not a sequence of stylistic periods but becomes a chain of problem-solving responses, which inspire or provoke.[1]

[1] Earnest, interview with Judy Millar, Brushstrokes in Documents, 331.

Mock up of installation. I am imagining THREE “hangings” depicting Three Weavers (Penelope, Philomena, Arachne), who communicated through art/weaving/the grid. It would consist of layers of fabric hanging like washing, with reference to the weaver’s character (imagined). The portrait hangings would act as a proposition. Clothes hanging being art, being a painting, being a history, generational.