'The Hanging Basket' structure resembles a Victorian lamp stand or sign. The initial image I worked from was a tacky baroque style flower ornament But working with the stacked cardboard I started working in modular circles, so the object was more simple than initially intended. The basket contains an image of Robert Smithson's 'Sunken Island' from 1971. The idea for the basket to contain something precious was an important image for me. The impossiblity of preservation.
Victoria Regia entitled 'Golden' this sat on a large cardboard plate stand, with a a cardboard cut-out map derived from a copy of a original planning map of Queens park,Invercargill from 1912. This work related to the image 'Scene 1' This photo was taken at the Southland Museum and Art Gallery after the residency period - a year or so later. I photographed cardboard works from Evergreen MKII in the Victorian rooms' museum display. A bizarre offset of a shredded sculpture in the ornate and decorative Victorian room. I wished to connect the works in the gallery space with this image of history.
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Constructed predominantly in cardboard and photographic imagery, Muirhead’s monumental project Polytears intertwines histories and moves between the realms of sculpture and installation. Muirhead manipulates this crude material and through texture, detail and grandiose scale, something magical, almost alchemical occurs. A series of inter-relating works linked by the ornate ovals and arabesques, Polytears feels akin to walking into an archaic Victorian ruin. Interior and exterior architecture emerge conveyed through intricately carved botanicals, lilies, a hanging basket and a framed living room scene. Muirhead ingeniously explores aspects of New Zealand’s colonial history to provide a platform of dialogue surrounding who we are as a nation today. An air of myth surrounds the social ambition, consumerism and politics of the Victorian era and in so doing, the here and now.
The notion of split sensibility runs throughout the artists’ exhibition in both material and subject matter. Seemingly at odds with the idyllic or sublime garden scene depicted, Muirhead effortlessly reconfigures the Victorian vista to her benefit. In modular sections of banal cardboard, Muirhead immerses herself in form, material, volume and space, and additionally with the role of the artist in influencing these. She carves, grinds and layers her material to produce botanic works of surprising beauty and subtlety.
The large photographic print ‘Scene 1’, framed in a 19th Century shaped cut card surround, forms a restrained counterpart to the elaborate sculptural assemblages. Amongst sumptuous living room furniture of the era, two crinoline mannequins rein act a Victorian existence. Stiff and lifeless, the women are ignorant to the cardboard lily pads buttressed upon a corner of the carpet. These living room lily pads correlate to the exterior floor and wall installations ‘Botanical’, ‘Golden’, ‘Monument’ and ‘Vein’. Additionally, the interior of the magnificent central ‘Hanging Basket’ links superbly, featuring the Robert Smithson image ‘Sunken Island’ (1972). ‘Hanging Basket’ is an exceptionally accomplished piece, its scale and detail reflecting the opulence of a bygone era. The fundamental alchemic nature of art making is explicitly honest in Anna Muirhead’s Polytears.
Text by Lydia Baxendell
Art works:
‘The Hanging Basket’, cardboard, wood 2200mm x 1000mm
'Monument', cardboard 500 x 800 x 800mm
'Botanical', cardboard 1000 x 1000m
'Golden', cardboard 1650 x 1400m
'Scene 1', photographic print, artist proof, cardboard frame 1200 x 800mm
'Vein', cardboard 1600 x 1600mm |
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