Let there be light - in its many forms

A haunting sense of light in its fleeting, mysterious beauty connects all four women in the Gallery at Woollaston's new exhibition And Light.... Naomi Arnold reports.

Gallery director Rebecca Hamid has gathered works by New Zealand artists Elizabeth Thomson, Gerda Leenards, Raewyn Atkinson and Megan Jenkinson in one room.

The four artists have produced works in very different media – Thomson in acrylic, polymer resin and glass; Leenards in acrylics on canvas; Atkinson in sculpted porcelain and wood; Jenkinson in photography. But all have explored their captivation with light and interpreted it in different ways. Light then exists as a subject in its own right, says Ms Hamid in her introductory essay: outside the subject matter, outside the construction of the piece, it takes on a life of its own.

Gerda Leenards sees her misty Fiordland paintings such as Deep Blue Cove as an exercise in "light and exploration" in a world untouched by humans. To look at them feels as though you might travel through the mists of Doubtful Sound to find hidden land forms beneath. They are the result of a physical search; a sense of adventure, says Leenards, that is absent in the traditional parlour paintings of women.

Elizabeth Thomson's large glass sculptural pieces play with optics, bending light with thousands of tiny beads. At once hard and soft, glittery and matte, opaque and transparent, they invite the viewer to step in closer, inspecting the way the light plays across their varied, three-dimensional surfaces.

Antarctica features heavily in the work of the two artists who have visited the Ice on creative fellowships. Raewyn Atkinson's Deep Time series – large, blue-green chunks of porcelain, like dirty ice – have gritty edges and warped forms, looking as though they may sag and melt any minute. The porcelain cans and macrocarpa boxes of her three works Iceberg Alley, Terra Nova and Cape Evans/The Ill Fated Party recall the stacked boxes of food in the huts of Scott and Shackleton, glowing with a ghostly luminescence. A smudged pyramid of smoky figures emerges from within the porcelain tins of Cape Evans/The Ill Fated Party, those of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1912 Terra Nova party, which reached the South Pole but died on the way home. Today their bodies are still buried in Antarctic ice, and when the gallery's lights are turned out, the sepia figures glow as if entombed within the white porcelain of the cans that once sustained them.

The photographs in Megan Jenkinson's Antarctic Crystals series glow like shards of glass. In their interior they reflect prisms and forms trapped within, clasped within aged period settings of ribbon and metal. In Antarctic Hero Jenkinson takes a bauble of achievement – a polar explorer's medal – and subverts its heroism completely, modifying Scott's badge of bravery into a diamond of polar ice. Beautifully harsh: and the instrument of his death.

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