Charlotte Handy: Heaphy's Garden

In “Heaphy’s Garden” Charlotte Handy enters the landscape of the forest, openly acknowledging in the title a childhood “first lens” debt to the depictions and interpretations of the NZ landscape in the work of colonial artist Charles Heaphy.

Handy presents the garden as a forest and with this metaphor central to the broad dialogues contained, commences her now characteristic exploration of the spaces between the abstract and the literal. She uses light, atmosphere, line, substance, shape and the hue of colour to express moments by holding them in suspension. Each work is comprised of fractured elements and floating tablets of colour – a consequential softness is established and conventional perspective is either dissolved or rendered ambiguously.

These paintings suggest the blends and attributes of watercolour but are not. Space hovers or is unspecified and slips backwards. Tree trunks and branches become revealed by incomplete lines or the paraphrase of shape. Patterns emerge, rhythms arise, facts and suggestion sit side by side. Handy distils essences – we know these are paintings of and about the natural world (the palette is unmistakably naturalistic) but these are also undeniably studio paintings built by a process of accretion and the discovery of emotion.

Light is presented as it is in the bush and forest as incomplete, segmented, shown to be contradictory and inconstant. The titles of the paintings evoke narratives of human experience, the passage of time, philosophical discourse and the processes of classification, be that botanical or personal.

These paintings are sophisticated. Information (and feeling) floods in and out. The complexity they come to attain belies their apparent simplicity.

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