Exhibitions » Exhibition Archive » 2005 » Jane Pountney—wade in the water
Jane Pountney—wade in the water
25 August - 20 December 2005 in the Entire Gallery
This exhibition is a tribute to one of Wellington’s foremost landscape artists of recent decades, Jane Pountney (1949-2004). Gathering together many of her key paintings, the exhibition reflects both the visionary intensity of her large canvases of the 1980s and early 90s, and the subtler nuances of her later work.
Smaller in scale, Pountney’s last works bespeak intimacy and warmth. Like Katherine Mansfield before her, she was entranced by the figures she observed on the beach at Eastbourne. As she wrote of her beach paintings when they were exhibited at Idiom Studio in 2001:
The paintings show the moments when the past, present and future are folded in on one another. When the sun is coming up or going down, or you’re sitting mesmerised in the perfect cocoon of a warm car looking out. I wanted a sense of how tenuous yet beautiful, exciting and sensuous the ‘now’ is, because it is already becoming the future.
Her paintings amount to a slowly evolving meditation on boundaries and crossings—they are also an immersion in earth, sky and water. Pountney’s work featured in the group exhibition ‘The Figured Landscape’ at City Gallery Wellington in 1995, and her paintings are represented in the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Auckland Art Gallery.
Jane Pountney died of cancer on 30 January 2004. At her request, the song ‘Wade in the Water’, by the Blind Boys of Alabama, was played at her funeral.
Public Programme
Panel Discission lead by curator Gregory O'Brien and Wellington artist Gerda Leenards,
focusing on Pountney's work in the context of contemporary landscape art,
