Should we run to the lake made of shining stones? – Saskia Bunce Rath

These dynamic scenes bulge in their frames towards the viewer. Confrontational and immediate in their imagery, they evoke a primal, animalistic power – sprinting through an empty field, rupturing forth from the landscape or looking upon rippling, emerging, environments.

Ideas of formation and reaction are fundamental to understanding these artworks. Something new is being formed, explored and brought into existence in these worlds. They act as both veiled mirrors to the artist’s life as well as emotive portraits for us to dive into. 

The surface of each work appears to react and pull with a directional force that sweeps through the compositions. Curated gradations in colour multiply the angular motion through the pictures. Long pointed strokes of thread and intervening sharp specks contrast against the softness of the material. Through intermingling her iconography with tactile colour and materiality Bunce-Rath builds detailed moments of delight, terror and contemplation.

The poems that accompanies the works don’t seek to explain the scenes but rather to expand them. They invite the viewer to cast themselves into the atmosphere of each work, further placing us
into these moments of charged action.

Saskia Bunce-Rath graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 2018. As an artist and poet, she explores mood and quasi-narratives through her depictions of ethereal creatures wandering in imagined lands. She mixes text and painterly compositions to further deepen her unearthly atmospheres. Texture, surreality and definition are built into her works through the use of brightly-coloured textiles and thread.