Julia Morison: Aibohphobia

Julia Morison is a local artist whose work was seen at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2006 in a survey exhibition called A loop around a loop. As the title of that exhibition suggests, Morison is an artist who likes to 'take a line for a walk', and her paintings of the last five years have featured ever more elegant and complex linear patterns, suggestive, among other things, of nerve systems, highways and labyrinths.

In this work for the Gallery Bunker, Morison plays with 'abyssal' patterns, which appear to describe a dizzying recession into visual space or a protrusion from it. The sense of visual vertigo is heightened by Morison's use of 'hi-vis green', a colour associated with the earthquake recovery teams currently occupying the Gallery. Finally the title alludes to the way the two sides of this design reverse or invert each other, so that the relationship between positive and negative space constantly twists and flips. 'Aibohphobia' is the fear of palindromes, which are words that say the same thing when read in reverse. The word itself is, naturally, a palindrome.

From a glowing billboard on Worcester Boulevard to sculpture on the Gallery forecourt, the Outer Spaces programme ensures there's art to see not just in Christchurch Art Gallery but on it. With the Gallery closed due to the Christchurch earthquakes, we're expanding the programme into the wider city. From vivid murals on huge public walls to night-time video projections in nearby houses, Outer Spaces introduces moments of surprise, humour, colour and wonder to the post-quake Christchurch streetscape.