A passion for the peculiar

By ANDREW CLIFFORD

In today's fast-paced environment of sleek glass towers and functional, minimalist furniture, the extravagant decorations and distractions of pre-Victorian times can seem so strange, they may as well be from another planet.

It was a period of elaborate elegance and ritual, of wigs, hooped skirts and snuff, when any respectable society lady wouldn't be seen without a lap dog in tow.

The peculiarities of the past provide a rich source of inspiration for young artists Octavia Cook and Kirstin Carlin, who highlight some of the odd practices of the time in their joint exhibition Pugs and Prey.

"Decoration in general is not that loved in the modern world so I like the idea of bringing it back and having things that are quite useless and purely decorative and seeing how far I can push it," says Cook, a jeweller whose conceptual approach has led to her work featuring in gallery exhibitions.

"I am quite influenced by antique jewellery and the Victorian or pre-Victorian era, that real preciousness and curiosity. People would have bizarre objects and forms - really cutesy and nothing to do with jewellery, as such, but just decorative elements.

"I liked the idea of the oddities and strange little animals. I was inspired by Limoges boxes, these French porcelain enamelled little snuff boxes and that probably goes with that era of some of Kirsten's paintings.

"I was really getting into the idea of the packaging around gifts, and jewels. The boxes these pieces come in are just amazing. I wanted to make my own set of boxes which you didn't have to put anything in because they were something in their own right."

Carlin has a similar fascination. "I just got this newfound love for art history," she says. "I found this era with [Thomas] Gainsborough and [Joshua] Reynolds, around the rococo era - these bright colours and crazy brush strokes they use - and just got carried away."

Carlin and Cook both studied at Unitec but neither was aware of the other's work until they appeared in a group show in Anna Miles Gallery last year. Miles, intrigued by the discovery of dogs wearing jewellery in historic portraits, noted an interesting overlap of interests and suggested a combined exhibition.

Carlin recalls, "A friend of Anna's took me to the Auckland Art Gallery and showed me a portrait of a woman holding a lapdog with earrings and I got really excited about the idea. Then I started researching these paintings of dogs, which have been painted for years."

Carlin has been Melbourne-based since last year so the two artists kept tabs on each other by email and struck up a rapport.

"I think we had a similar sense of humour in our work," says Carlin.

"When I heard about the snuff boxes, it inspired me to paint more dogs, especially when I read about them as well, because pugs were very prominent."

Carlin takes a magpie-like approach to finding imagery. Her previous works have re-contextualised imagery from folk, pop and choral album covers. For Pugs and Prey she has mixed and matched animals and potential owners from famous portraits or the internet.

"The dogs are either from the paintings or from the internet," Carlin confirms.

"I've either given them famous owners or based them on famous paintings.

"My studio is covered in printouts of old paintings and weird photos from the internet.

"I've always been really interested in sourcing my imagery from the internet. People put photographs of their cute dogs on there and I'll steal them away."

The exhibition also features work that confuses famous still life and landscape paintings and internet imagery.

"The still lifes are copied from Dutch still lifes from the 1600s. I've taken them into photoshop, simplified them and painted them again. I like the idea of a portrait, which isn't a portrait, and then a still life, which is almost traditional but not quite.

"Most of them are images from the internet, which I've named after paintings. Suffolk, 1727, is the year Gainsborough was born and he was born in Suffolk and I loosely based the colours on one of his works."

Cook says she is still using traditional jewellery techniques.

"I like the scale of it and the preciousness is really important to me. I'm still going on that thread of going back and bringing things forward and spitting them out again in a messy kind of way. We both delve into the past."

Exhibition

* What: Pugs and Prey, by Octavia Cook and Kirstin Carlin

* Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery, Suite 4J, 47 High St, to August 28