Opening: Sunday 7 November 2pm – 4.30pm, 7–14 November
Keening - (Auckland preview)
In the sculpture studio of Terry Stringer, 8 Couldry Street (Yellow Door) Eden Terrace.
Keening, Te Manawa Museum, Palmerston North, 11 December 2021 – 29 April 2022
When I paint, I’m trying to find feeling; it’s as simple and as complicated as that. I try to make paintings that remind us how much emotional muscle we have.
The materiality of paint holds a lot - it can carry gestures and energies that are unsettling, disturbing or blissful, and sensations like plummeting and flight, simultaneously. The more years I spend painting, the more magical this seems to me.
The raw linen shows through the paint; these paintings are not whole stories. If anything, they’re the holes in stories, showing themselves being made and undone. Untethering at the threshold. Paintings themselves can work as thresholds, by creating a literal second skin to move through, to feel moved.
Studio life has found me tracing back through my Pākehā genealogy, looking for when we were last fluent in moving between worlds - before we were fluent in the separation and domination narratives of colonisation. Looking for threshold-language mentors, I rediscovered the keeners in Celtic traditions, whose practice (at a death) among other elements, involves wailing, so that a deceased spirit can pass over fully, and the living are moved to let loose the wildness of their grief, then and there. The keener’s cry unravels the world as it is, so it can re-form enough to be lived in.
Unravelling and reforming - using feeling as the primary navigator - these have been my studio clues for working
in paint.
This exhibition is dedicated to those who work in transformational practices at other thresholds — to the keeners, kaikaranga, midwives, rongoā practitioners, palliative carers, choreographers, therapists and healers, to name a few. To people who the world makes liminal, including those who live between gender — ours are some of many bodies that keep the thresholds of the world from closing down. To experts from the natural world: the mangroves, the dawn, the dusk - thank you for showing us how to thrive at the in-between. To the people whose bones sparked these paintings, who were open to their form dancing off the edge of recognisable, into a third space here, thank you, Jack Trolove.
Jack has been a practicing artist for over twenty years, showing in spaces across Aotearoa, Australia and Europe. He has an MFA from Massey University and is currently pursuing his doctorate at Elam School of Fine Arts. He has been awarded an international artist residency by the Scottish Arts Council and has undertaken other residencies in France and Spain. He’s been an award winner and finalist in the Wallace Art Awards on multiple occasions. His last solo show, ‘Tenderise’, was the subject of a feature review in Art New Zealand. Reviewer Michael Dunn wrote, "Tenderise proves to be, on reflection, a show of considerable depth and relevance. In it, Trolove has evolved as a painter of substance as well as a virtuoso manipulator of paint".
Jack’s work can be found in public and private collections both here and overseas.
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Published 5 November 2021