Microcosms – Saskia Bunce-Rath, Lisa Patterson, Dean Venrooy
Lisa Patterson
Lyttelton based artist Lisa Patterson’s meticulously handcrafted objects incorporate elemental materials such as wood and lead, investing simple motifs with a sense of mystery and revelation reminiscent of age-old allusions to religious or ritualistic icons and hidden worlds. This sense of secrecy and wonder is supported by the small scale of many of Patterson’s works and the artisanal nature of the shaping and carving involved in their production.
Saskia Bunce-Rath
Saskia Bunce-Rath explores mood and quasi-narratives through her embroidered works. Scenes and animalistic characters tell stories full of surreal myth and mystery crossed with her personal life. Bunce-Rath creates these worlds using bold thread that ripples through each composition like brushstrokes leaping out of their frames.
Dean Venrooy
Canterbury artist Dean Venrooy’s small, crystalline oil paintings are perfectly structured re-enactments of the natural environment of Banks Peninsula. Using the landscape of his home, on the edge of Lyttelton Harbour, as the building blocks for his work, he presents objects – tables, books, ladders, altar-like cloths – and birds corralled within the hills and valleys into small symmetries of colour and form: fragile as daydreams; as real as the landscape out his window.