Former St John’s College student’s art on display at Hastings Art Gallery

Jeremy Gaffaney pictured with his mother Megan (left), grandmother Kay Bazzard and father Ryan. Photo / Tom Kitchin

COLUMN

Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery kairuruku whakatairanga marketing co-ordinator Tom Kitchin explores the artwork coming from our schools with a former St John’s College student.

Jeremy Gaffaney’s art may be described as “macabre” and a little “weird”, but it’s also visceral, colourful and packed with meaning.

His work is definitely one of the more striking I saw when I first walked into the Top Art roadshow at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery.

The roadshow features a selection of NCEA Level 3 portfolios that achieved Excellence in Visual Arts last year.

Jeremy, 19, who went to St John’s College, is one of the students lucky enough to get their work toured around 15 different venues across the country.

I had a chat with him and his family when they visited the gallery to view Jeremy’s artwork.

Jeremy Gaffaney with his grandmother Kay Bazzard at a workshop at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery, back in 2017. Photo / Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga

Jeremy’s portfolio, titled Consumption Without Sustenance, is a collection of 17 paintings, which he says tackle hookup culture.

“You’re getting this idea of emotional intimacy by getting physically intimate with someone else … it’s like you’re consuming something, but you’re not actually getting anything of value.”

Many of the artworks appropriate well-known religious paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Jeremy paints himself as the main figure.

“Taking art history in Year 13, I was very much influenced by ideas of humanism and taking inspiration from the Renaissance era,” Jeremy says.

“It was very interesting compositionally and I always knew that I wanted to be painting myself as little self-portraits, even though none of them really looked like it!”

Looking closely at the painting, I’m struck by Jeremy’s attention to detail – the single head hairs, the pieces of grass and veins on hearts, for instance, and the use of colour, from the stark black and white in one corner to the layered, murky, sunrise-tainted skies in the other.

But it’s fair to say it’s not the most traditional and safe mix of paintings – and Jeremy says the reaction’s been somewhat challenging.

“It is a pretty macabre portfolio and weird, so very much the general reaction is a bit like ‘what the hell’”.

I’m also interested to hear how much Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga has influenced Jeremy’s journey into art.

Jeremy grew up in Hastings. His parents, Ryan and Megan, often brought their son to our gallery for school holiday programmes and exhibitions.

“I remember a couple that were very interesting … the white Lego installation [Olafur Eliasson’s 2016 exhibition The Cubic Structural Evolution Project] that was very fun,” Jeremy says.

“The school holiday programmes were fantastic,” Megan says.

It probably helped that Jeremy’s grandmother – well-known Hawke’s Bay sculptor Kay Bazzard - ran some gallery workshops herself.

“I’ve run a few clay modelling workshops here too, in this room,” Bazzard says – speaking in Auaha – the gallery’s classroom.

But she says it even took her “a bit of adjusting” after seeing her grandson’s painting.

“I was actually fairly amazed and fascinated with the whole figurative aspect because it’s my area of interest,” she says.

“The way I could adjust to this was to regard it as surrealist.”

The last question I have is where Jeremy plans to take his art – but he tells me he’s “not putting too much pressure on it”.

“It might be a bit better to focus on more of a stable career for now. I don’t necessarily need to have art as the whole focal point of my life because I’ve got other interests.”

Jeremy is studying commerce and psychology at Victoria University.

“I was originally thinking of becoming a psychologist, but then I’m sort of getting to the point where I don’t know if I can be bothered listening to whining teenagers,” he laughs.

“So if I do go into that - maybe [I’ll] study brain science and neurology.”