I gotta use words when I talk to you at Sue Crockford Gallery

John Reynolds' Stairs to Heaven incorporates the tukutuku design which is also known as poutama or stairs to knowledge. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Although there is little text in John Reynolds' latest exhibition, I gotta use words when I talk to you, there are a lot of conversations going on as Reynolds navigates a dialogue between his influences.

"I intended this show to be a contemplation of legacy," he says, referring to the two books that inspired the show.

"The first is a book by Margaret Atwood, called Negotiating with the Dead, and it's an examination of writers on writing. It's about the nature of the creative act in the literary world and an examination of, when we talk about giftedness, what is the nature of the gift, who is the gift from, what is it?

"This is obviously with reference to my legacy and trying to understand how one negotiates a practice in any field with regard to the past and prior achievements and in the medium of your choice."

The other book, which has the more visible presence in this exhibition, is The Transatlantic Paintings, which literally puts Piet Mondrian's later paintings under the microscope.

"What attracted me to it was a series of X-ray photographs of the internals of those beautiful abstract works," says Reynolds.

"Initially, I thought this is an abhorrent violence being foisted upon these great, still, abstract performances. And quite the opposite is apparent in the photographs - it's almost like looking at photographs of the canals of Mars or something. This tremendous inner softness emerges as the works are exposed."

In response, Reynolds has combined Mondrian's famously crisp abstract paintings with initial drawings done on a ripped-up cigarette carton and the constant corrections made during the painting process and revealed by X-ray.

Typically, Reynolds' work is densely layered with references and quotations - the exhibition's title is from a T.S. Eliot poem.

"That thing is also a faint and rather clumsy echo to McCahon's I Will Need Words," says Reynolds. "I like the fact that it's another quote, it was another voice I brought into the show.

"On a personal sense, I've got to use words. There aren't words in these works - there is vocabulary pursued here and there. But, in a personal sense, I'm referring to that very unsteady conversation the artist has with an audience."

Reynolds has also executed two wall drawings for his show. Stairs to Heaven is the first work you see on entering the gallery. It incorporates the tukutuku design which is also known as poutama or stairs to knowledge.

As well as echoing the patterned tiles of the gallery, Stairs to Heaven makes reference to his father, who died last month.

"I am trying to make sense or make provision or make some acknowledgement of legacy in a wider sense and in a narrow personal sense," says Reynolds.

"We all have to negotiate this turbulence in your life - it is a phenomenon that happens to you; you have no choice. I guess, with that kind of swirling territory, these works have developed quite recently."

The tukutuku motifs have been with him for a long time. "I did some drawings probably 25 years ago in the Christchurch Cathedral when I first visited Christchurch, where my dad was born.

"There they have got some very nice tukutuku and it was where I first registered an interest in the gap between the big-noted stuff, and here was this extraordinary pattern.

"It's also got a strangely Punch-and-Judy quality. This is a kind of backdrop against which a greater theatre is at play and a living community, as well as a dead community, meet and that transaction is available."

Maps and journeys have been a frequent theme in Reynolds' work and here they are present in the New York-inspired bustle of Mondrian's map-like grids, which also have a personal resonance.

"My dad was an architect and I started, before I was even at school, drawing and having a fascination with drawing based on my dad bringing home rolls of plans," says Reynolds.

"We had two opportunities; we could draw on the side with nothing on it, turn the thing over and there's this set of designs of, say, the electric circuitry of the school of engineering, and you could draw in amongst all this. So, architecture and cities, it's all there."

Stairs to Heaven could also be read as a nod to the famous Led Zeppelin song which Reynolds' brother Patrick points out is a popular tune at funerals.

Musical references regularly appear in Reynolds' work, be it pop-song titles that often crop up or the Nirvana lyrics he appropriated in a work last year, providing a seemingly profane counterpoint to his erudite literary allusions of recent years. Then there are the album-cover designs he did for Blam Blam Blam in the early 1980s.

"I think music particularly has that ability to destabilise. The whole project for mid-career artists can become tremendously closed up because you've argued and you've accrued and you've arrived at a set of principles, which declare the space you're working in.

"Music - and every teenager in the world understands this - is a great vehicle for disassembling received ideas, fast-tracking emotive connectiveness, for declaring personal and independent spaces, and for transgressions.

"That's exactly what we want from art. We want art to be inclusive in the metaphoric range and we want it to be able to draw in that connectiveness and individual views, whether we riff on them or not."

*What: I gotta use words when I talk to you, by John Reynolds
*Where and when: Sue Crockford Gallery, 2 Queen St, to Sep 10