Working under the pall of a pandemic and in the bubble of lockdown is certain to change the ideas and inspiration of those making art.
She needed to find a new way-in to making images that could deal with the new barrage of information, to create something that would hold all the new feelings, and bring some lightness to the terseness of our times.
Collage collects the images of our world and arranges them into a new narrative. It’s perfect for sorting a world mediated to us through pictures into something more personal. Recently given some old copies of New Zealand Geographic, Teresa saw a familiarity in the images of sky, sea and land: this was home and this was relevant. She could weave together pictures of native flora and fauna, of activities disallowed under lockdown such as tramping and fishing, and re-combine these with the naked flesh of her previous cuttings and her own photographs.
Her works build ambiguous narratives, layering images taken from science, art, and of the figure to suggest new relationships between them. There is a sense of mythology being created, a kind of home-grown animism. The wings of endangered terns make angels of anonymous figures. The original image was of a museum specimen, killed by a cat at Omaha; I regard her studio cat shredding discarded NZ Geographic cuttings…
In one of the larger works, the heads of arum lilies tumble like painted eyes. Teresa took photos of the lilies that grow in Matauri Bay, looking down onto Samuel Marsden’s first church. They hold many references – an invasive species which because of their beauty represent lust but also purity, death as well as resurrection, and mixed here with stalk-like arms and hands, could mean all these at once.
Lane’s exhibition is titled ‘Love in the Time‘, a nod to author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yet these are not works anxious about our present predicament – anxiety might be there, but it is mixed healthily through with our other emotions, to offer stories full of life in these altered times. (Evan Woodruffe/Studio Art Supplies)