Allen Maddox began producing his well-known ‘X’ paintings around 1975 when, in a moment of despondency, he angrily defaced a painting he was working on with an X. The motif stuck, and he began repeating his 'crosses in boxes' over and over on his canvases. There is a compulsiveness in Maddox’s ‘X’ paintings; at once ordered yet disordered, they demonstrate a combination of gestural boldness and neurotic energy. Maddox commented in 1977 that he ‘would like to be able to visually reproduce the little electric thought patterns that go on in your head when one is paranoiac… How I thrill to a composition resolved by “painterly” means. Splashes, strokes, aesthetic errors.’

(No! That’s wrong XXXXXX, 25 June 2016 – 30 April 2017)

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding have always been interested in the invisible energies that surround us, and that curiosity often finds its way into their art. Electromagnetic radiation is in the air all around us, but in this work we see it in action. The artists perform a mysterious dance with fluorescent light tubes under the huge transmission towers near their home in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia. The electrical field created by the towers is strong enough to affect the mercury gas inside the tubes, creating an ultraviolet light that strikes the tubes’ phosphor coating and makes them glow strangely against the night sky.

(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)

In the second half of the 1940s, Juliet Peter became more widely known as an illustrator through her role for the Department of Education’s School Publications branch and commissions by the New Zealand Listener. As this series of black and white sketches indicate, her interest in rural life informed the texts she chose to illustrate. A 1948 profile of the artist reported that her work often included field trips: “Miss Peter does not do all her drawings in the office. Last week she went out stalking a milkman and his horse to get sketches for a story […] another day she walked through half a mile of sticky mud to make drawings inside a wool-shed for the shearing chapter in Te Awa Awa.”

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)

In the second half of the 1940s, Juliet Peter became more widely known as an illustrator through her role for the Department of Education’s School Publications branch and commissions by the New Zealand Listener. As this series of black and white sketches indicate, her interest in rural life informed the texts she chose to illustrate. A 1948 profile of the artist reported that her work often included field trips: “Miss Peter does not do all her drawings in the office. Last week she went out stalking a milkman and his horse to get sketches for a story […] another day she walked through half a mile of sticky mud to make drawings inside a wool-shed for the shearing chapter in Te Awa Awa.”

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)