Tyne Gordon: Visitor

“In Visitor, a liminal experience is created in the space between boundaries (domesticity, walls, corners, geometry) and expansion (wilderness, organic material, infinity, atmosphere, liquidity).

Visitor is a continuation of Gordon’s interest in internal and external concepts of landscape and the body, seen through a ritualistic, alien lens.

Visitor is a conjuration that allows the dichotomy between the human body and the non-human landscape to be temporarily transcended.” – Jasmine Gallagher

Poetic narrative is often associated with Tyne Gordon’s work, many find themselves personifying her paintings and subject matter through language that equally describes the body as it does a landscape. The hands of the maker are clear in the shaping of the moulds and frames which border her paintings and likewise in the gestural brushwork. The artist nimbly melds two dimensional with three-dimensional; the development of her practice since graduating arts school has seen the artist stretch beyond the painted plane to encompass sculpture and installation into the architecture of her practice; thus, the exhibition space embodies the full breadth of Gordon’s practice.

Visitor takes a step away from the artist’s more playful past shows towards something more psychological and ritualistic. Drawing on Gordon’s ephemeral relationship with the land, this exhibition was spurred by the research of geological sites in the Bay of Plenty, made possible with support from Creative New Zealand. Gordon often visits scenery to spur inspiration and even though she often paints, landscape-like or outdoor-invoking subject matter, there is no explicit connection to painted piece and the landscape the artist visited. Each work Gordon creates is built from her head: from intuition and experience.

The wall based paintings and sculptures that hail from found domestic objects reflect the artist’s interest in playing around with opposites. The artist takes sourced objects out of their context and removes them of their functionality similar to the manner in which she creates landscapes free of context and scale, that instead hinge on texture: the organic and soft versus smooth and solid. Alongside Gordon’s usual suspects – soap, wax, mosaic and paint – aluminium makes its debut as a prominent material in this new body of work.