Biomorphic Beings and the wahine who made it happen
The place of art in any given period is up in the air for the sake of its own contention: the spaces we use to create and exhibit such works, what the meaning of art is, and how it functions in relationships between meaning and form are always axioms of discussion.
The recent opening of an exhibition in the Devonport-based Depot Artspace has marked yet another contribution in an infinite conversation on art by wahine youth to contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand. Biomorphic Beings, the collaboration of fine-arts graduates and budding Tāmaki Makaurau-based artists Sasha Ellis, Kiara Schaumkell, Saskia van Dijk, and Rose Lasham, offers original insight into the themes of bodily function, the metaphysics of the psyche, and the relation of the body as being to natural variables like growth and decay.
Kiara Schaumkell has dedicated her artistic endeavours to the creation of two square works sculptures of 2.1×2.1m each, both titled Flesh Monolith. Schaumkell’s thesis considers the connection between the body-as-corporeal-being and the disobeying psyche. Decompartmentalising skin as merely a contained vehicle of human consciousness, she forces the viewer to recon with skin as it exists as the subject. Art Historian Chari Larsson notes ‘as a material substance, wax discourages stable possession’, a statement that poignantly relates to Kiara’s medium choice of calico, wax and polyester to create a viscerally realistic effect of contorted, displaced flesh. Her work is an excellent example of conceptual art dematerializing the subject into an ever-still complex form.
Sasha Ellis’ work relates the perception of the body to the psyche as the perceptor. Her works Toilet Vanity, Baby Face, and Doppelgänger denote a macabre theme employed with use of bloodied backgrounds and contorted or alienated subjects, or depictions of hospital patients that juxtaposes life and death, relating to the core of Biomorphic Beings’ purpose: to bring the viewer to the limit of experience in human fragility as physical entities in nature. Ellis studies the psychosomatic experiences of spiritual and psychological depiction through the oil on canvas mediums to elucidate depth, which she does effortlessly.
Fascinated by the concept of animism -‘the belief that everything on earth has a vital presence and agency’- Rose Lasham is an artist of acrylic on canvas and ceramic sculpture whose work forms an interlude between naturalism and transcendence. Her works Lichen and Far From Home are examples of paintings delineating the vast complexities of nature, while her ceramic Epiphloedal Imaginings collection is a heterodox portrayal of organic life blends phantasmal and organic motifs. Finally, her acrylic painting Nourishment is a fusing of biblical iconography, mutilation, and reinitiation.
Finally, Saskia van Dijk is an ar. Her anomalous paintings depict disidentified subjects in positions removed from the relativity of space and time, elevating them to position of material otherness. Deity, Supine and Entanglement are examples of works which epitomises this effect, drawing on boundaries within the frame to create a sensorial association with the viewer as well as flush hues to disconcert the lines between the subjects’ flesh and the background. This detail is utilised by van Dijk as a vessel for a theoretical concept known as “skin-ego”, outlined by French Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu as the juxtaposition between the containment of the psyche and the effect of the skin as the external boundary of our consciousness. This impression is marked yet again in her works Incandescence and Submergence, both concerning singular, dissociated subjects which purvey a lamenting, disquieted ideal, and fracturing the traditional method of subject depiction and consecrating them amongst the backdrops.
There is a transgressive, unique, and dynamistic set of ideals that fournish the Depot Artspace now, and until March 16th of 2024, you can bear witness to a new mastery of form and essence as I have.