Miranda Parkes
b.1977
Slumper
- 2006
- Acrylic on canvas
- Purchased 2006
- 1800 x 2200 x 320mm
- 2006/17
Revelling in a kind of contemporary baroque, Miranda Parkes’ Slumper began as a three by nine metre piece of flat canvas, but – being too large for the studio floor – had to be folded into thirds before being painted and scrunched into this form. Having grappled with the problem of creating more objects in a world already filled with objects, Parkes negotiated a kind of truce with this dilemma, flipping it around and using spectacular excess as a potentially useful ingredient. While retaining an honest, at times iconoclastic stance, she is nevertheless drawn to the sensory aspects of canvas, colour and paint; elaborate costume, circus tents and over-the-top, opulent interiors are occasionally grist to her painter’s mill.
(As Time Unfolds, 5 December 2020 – 7 March 2021)
Exhibition History
Miranda Parkes’ Slumper occupies its own unique territory, but might also be seen as the wayward love child of British op artist Bridget Riley and American pop artist Claes Oldenburg, best-known for his giant, painted soft sculptures. Slumper seems ready to enfold the viewer and also perfectly comfortable in its own billowing skin. (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
Brought to light, November 2009- 22 February 2011
Abstract art is almost a century old but, in the hands of Christchurch painter Miranda Parkes, it’s still capable of youthful and irreverent behaviour. Parkes’s painting here does what parents tell their children not to do: it slumps. If it were stretched flat, the work’s striped surface might suggest order and precision. But its spectacularly rumpled state starts to suggest other things – a lavish garment just vacated by a body, or perhaps an unmade bed. Like her teacher Julia Morison, whose lavish work hangs opposite, Parkes makes paintings that happily flirt with fashion and decoration.
Tethered lightly to the gallery walls, this twisting, voluminous canvas behaves more like a sculpture than a painting. What we might expect to be a flat surface erupts and expands, defying the limits of painting’s conventional two dimensions. Slumper is celebratory, exuberant and playful, but like all of Miranda Parkes’s works, also pointedly aware of its relationship to the history of modernist abstraction. By flirting with the decorative, it deliberately echoes and subverts that tradition.
Parkes received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 2005. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout New Zealand, including ‘Hummer, Crasher, Groover, Slacker’ (2006) and ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me Baby’ (2005) at 64zero3 in Christchurch, and Hullbreach at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington in 2004. Parkes is currently the William Hodges artist in residence at the Southland Museum and Art Gallery in Invercargill. (Contemporary Collections hang, 2007)
Related reading: Op + Pop
Notes
Unruly, unexpected and oblique images
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Notes
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Manchester Street, Christchurch by Louise Henderson was painted in 1929 and shows a streetscape that remained largely unchanged until the earthquake of 22 February.
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One of the highlights for staff over the eight or so years that the Christchurch Art Gallery was open prior to the shakes was the opportunity to work alongside Julian Dashper on his exhibition To The Unknown New Zealander.
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Untitled 1956 by Gordon Walters
This article first appeared as 'Balancing act' in The Press on 17 August 2012.
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Glittering
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Selected proofs
Peter Trevelyan's exhibition Selected Proofs is currently on at the University of Canterbury's SOFA Gallery until 7th September.
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The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery
Was it serendipity that the opening of Christchurch Art Gallery's Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker coincided with that of Slip Cast, a group exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum that also focused on the pleasure that artists take in manipulating materials in the process of making art?
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New Zealand in the Biennale of Sydney and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
Collection
Gordon Walters Black on white
Gordon Walters is best-known for work that fused the influence of European modernist art and Māori and Pacific art forms, particularly the koru motif of painted kōwhaiwhai rafter designs. Walters’ influences from European modernism included the hard-edged geometric abstractions of Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin, seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Walters made his first optically charged ‘koru paintings’ in 1956, but didn’t show them until 1966 when he first exhibited this painting in Auckland.
Walters’ adaptation of the koru has been both admired and criticised by cultural commentators. Walters himself, when discussing the motif, increasingly focused on the fine mechanics of abstraction:
'What I’ve done to the form is push it more in the direction of geometry. So that I can have in my painting not only a positive/negative effect of black and white, but I can also have a working of vertical and horizontal, which is equally important.' (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)
