You and your resolve

6 july – 25 august 2019

The Vivian, Matakana, New Zealand

Accompanying text

You And Your Resolve

I often have words swimming around in my head and certain combinations have a delightful ring to them. They don’t necessarily make sense, but I enjoy the sound of language and these particular word formations point towards, or sit parallel to, the kind of resonance evident in the work. For this show? Final Fantasy. Mentally on repeat these past few weeks, the word ‘final’ feels like the possibility of space (or more correctly, no-space) emerging at a beginning or end. Like a pause between the inhalation and exhalation of breath. A pause, always infinite in depth, uncovering a felt state of resonance with the whole. The second part to this lyrical musing of Final Fantasyis in that each work generates an internal world I might best describe as a fiction. Each interlocking gesture an internal agony, squeezing both time and space into a single plane. Bodily forms spew forth, manifesting an internal chaos reminiscence of either our internal organs, or perhaps a whole universe. Either way, the fiction generates it’s own aura, with it’s own kind of (twisted) logic. 

I’m interested in the slippage between what we think we know and the felt state of the body, asking how painting might act as a stimulus to transcend the everyday experience of living. To me, these works enact a kind of ‘opening’ and through this a felt exaltation or agony by tight coiling gestures that hold a tension and release. A frozen moment of ecstasy perhaps, equally delicious as it is grotesque. The significance of the large scale allows us to become aware of the relative size of our bodies before it. In both scale and style, abstraction is ‘an ideal vehicle for something as enigmatic and subjective as the spiritual. Abstract art functions wordlessly as a conduit to the Other. It draws us into uncharted territory.’[1] As a female artist I’m interested in the labour of my own body producing work to a scale that overwhelms the physical body, repelling any possibility of domestication. 

[1]Fanning, Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, 73.

Grace Wright, You And Your Resolve, 
The Vivian, 6 July - 25 August 2019