Gerda Leenards

16 October - 23 November 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Fjords, Mist & Vapour

Paintings of landscape, sky and weather can never be more than fragments of their subject matter. This inherent failure or limitation is explored in Gerda Leenards’ Fjords mists & vapour, a sequence of dramatically edited views of the physical world.

FJORDS. The series is based on views around Deep Cove, in Doubtful Sound, Fiordland, which the artist photographed and sketched while accompanying a scientist on a research trip in 2002. The painted fragments of bushy hillside, which extend along one wall of the Hirschfeld Gallery, are—if you look closely— the same segment of landscape. The sequencing of the images is temporal rather than spatial: the weather changes a little, the light adjusts, but the picture-frame moves only slightly. Just as the series confounds any attempts to read narrative into it—a flicker of a waterfall is the only ‘incident’ in the sequence—the paintings also resist any topographical or geographical purpose. Like all Leenards’ work, the series is an exploration of ‘landscape’ in a general sense. ‘It is the abstract and emotive qualities that are important to me—the subject is only part of it.’

MISTS. These are paintings of an immaterial world, of an environment which sits just outside the narratives, meanings and purposes humankind imposes upon it. Containing but never quite conforming to Romantic and Gothic notions of the natural world, the paintings are at once elemental and otherworldly. They are imbued with the mood of W. B. Yeats's Mad as the mist and snow: ‘That everything outside us is/ Mad as the mist and snow’. This series of paintings finds itself in an extended family of mist-inflected landscapes, or anti-landscapes. There are echoes of Anne Noble’s Whanganui River photographs, not to mention of Turner, poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jerusalem-era James K. Baxter, filmmakers Andrey Tarkovsky and Vincent Ward, and a raft of other weather-obsessives, all of whom have been transfixed by the expressive potential of weather, light and atmosphere.

VAPOUR. As one of many Oxford Dictionary definitions goes, vapour is ‘a substance in the form of a gas or of a suspension of minute droplets’. This offers a clue to Leenards’ methodology: these small edits of landscape are ‘droplets’ suspended in the gallery space. Yet the works themselves are far from vaporous, their wooden surfaces a tactile presence on the wall. This is a sequence rich in paradoxes and ambiguities. In spite of the immateriality of their subject matter, these fervent rectangles stand their ground as painted artefacts, as explorations of an evolving painterly language.

IMMATERIAL WORLD. Do these paintings explore a state of mind, a strand of human history, or art history? Are they spiritual or climatological? Are they environmental or existential? Why would an artist align such a ‘timeless’ subject with such temporal and physical sequencing? These are not self-contained pictures so much as they are pieces of landscape rhythmically stepping their way around the gallery walls; landscapes in which—and perhaps this is the point—the only human presence is the viewer in the gallery. The observation of these works, it follows, becomes an act of self-scrutiny. If that is a lesson Leenards learned from Colin McCahon, this series of works has also drawn deeply on meteorology and other strands of science. Despite the geometry and carefully modulated intervals of the panels, the paintings—like the most interesting scientific specimens—remain inscrutable, just beyond the reach of the rational mind.

Gregory O'Brien

Born in Nijmegen, Holland, in 1946, Gerda Leenards immigrated with her family to New Zealand in 1956. Her work has featured in four previous exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington. She lives and works at Breaker Bay, Wellington

Fjords, Mist & Vapour is presented within the 360 programme - a full perspective on Wellington art and design, which is generously sponsored by Designworks. Thanks also to Colourcraft, and Publication & Design, Wellington City Council.