Leakage from the Text
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Throughout a career spanning
more than twenty-five years, Pauline Rhodes
has been making works both in the environment
and in specific gallery contexts – works
that challenge conventional representations
of the landscape in New Zealand and traditional
sculptural practice. Embracing the categories
of sculpture, performance, installation, drawing
and photography, Rhodes’s installation
at the Adam Art Gallery reveals the artist’s
reflective engagement with materials, processes
and sites, and highlights the ephemeral nature
of her practice.
Rhodes does not make permanent objects, refuses
to treat her images as final products and
works only in temporary modes, often outside
the normal contexts for visual arts reception.
Central to her practice is both the possibility
and impossibility of communicating adequately
through any means. Rhodes states: "I
seek to give evidence to ideas, activity and
sensation in a world of complexity and ambiguity."
The exhibition project coincides with the
launch of a major new book documenting Rhodes’s
practice from her first installation in 1977
to her millennial work, Ziggurat 2000. Published
by the Adam Art Gallery and Victoria University
Press Ground/Work: The Art of Pauline Rhodes
is written by Victoria University lecturer,
Christina Barton.
For Barton, Rhodes’s work brings together
many of her key concerns: an abiding interest
in experimental art practices, a commitment
to the work of women artists and a personal
fascination with New Zealand’s landscape.
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