Anna Crichton & Jocelyn Carlin

Anna Crichton | 'Leapfrog in the Park' and other pastures

& Jocelyn Carlin | 'To Be: Portraits'

9th - 27th November 2010

Opening: Tues 9th November, 5.30 – 7pm

Anna Crichton

This time it's personal.....

“Normally I'm an illustrator for hire, working to a brief and a deadline. With these works I've allowed myself the time to dream, travel and explore my life in the unpredictable medium of ceramic glazes”.

Within the work there is erotica, horseplay, running with wolves, tricky finger play and the joyful curiousness of images that come out of the blue. Visually seductive, the jewel-like 3D glazes bring these ceramic dreams irresistibly alive.

Anna Crichton is a two times Qantas Media Award-Winning illustrator (2007 & 2010), who spends much of her time creating satirical work in pen and ink.  A regular contributor to the New Zealand Herald, Anna's work also appears in magazines including The Listener, North & South and Metro Magazine. Over a long and successful career Anna has illustrated for publications all over the world including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Australian and Time Magazine.

Jocelyn Carlin is a storyteller.

Jocelyn Carlin began taking photographs as a child. Guided by the rich history of the medium she moves from reportage to art projects with unflinching enthusiasm.  Within the strict and still frame of a photograph she strives to capture the intangible - simple human life.

This body of work, To Be: Portraits, explores the essence of selfhood: awareness, expression, identity, relatedness, strength, weakness, potential. The process of darkroom portraiture was directly inspired by Len Lye’s photograms.

It is a re-discovery of the craft of photography; revelling in the mysteries of a seemingly archaic darkroom, combining technique with observation, pairing artistic intent with uncertainty of outcome. These portraits are a new way of seeing ourselves but being reminiscent of eighteenth century silhouettes, they are also anchored in the past (the immensely popular shadow tracings were a cheap quick method of recording a person’s profile). [Ref: Bill Jay on Photography, From Magic to Mimesis]

The portraits are more than a simple record of a human profile. Like the Self, they are subtle and complex, layered, textured, flawed and beautiful.

To Be is the newest addition to the greater project Likeness which grew from the perceived objectivity of reportage, and evolved into something else – less objective but more essential to the concerns of the human-life-teller.

In Kakashi, Japanese Scarecrows are fixed to the land like idols to an ominous contemporary culture; their hand-drawn faces frozen, grim and bewildered by the click of the shutter. In Madame Tussauds of London; wax forms imitate life and living forms pose wax-like beside them or search their sightless eyes for proof of an absent spark. Metaphor Metaphor questions how we see ourselves, our communities, our cultures – and reflects the answers back with cold clarity.