Eye for beauty through pearl

By T J McNAMARA


Materials matter, and the day when art was only rectangular paintings and bronze statues has long gone.

At the John Leech Gallery until December 11, Sofia Tekela-Smith makes a feature of the craft material mother-of pearl. But paradoxically, her art works most strongly when the material is photographed on a female figure rather than when it is used as a material by itself.

Her show is made up of four exceptionally large photographs and a series of breastplate necklaces. The unifying idea is the representation and power of female beauty.

The exhibition is called Brown Eyes Blue, which may be a reference to The Bluest Eye, a novel by black American writer Toni Morrison, who movingly described the plight of a girl who wanted her lovely brown eyes to be blue.

The striking photographs show women wearing large necklaces of mother-of-pearl with a strong ethnic quality. They look challengingly at the viewer and reach forward with hands stained to the elbow with blood-red paint.

In each photograph the hands make a different gesture, suggesting such things as reaching out and building.

These powerful women are at their best in the three photographs where they are directly frontal.

Despite the splendid form of the model, the fourth photograph - which has the head at an angle and a listening gesture - does not convey the same forceful female presence.

The subject of the power of beauty adorned is curiously conflated with irony about the colonial "dusky maiden" in the subjects etched by laser on the mother-of-pearl necklaces.

These hover in the area between art and craft. They are big enough to approach sculpture but the shell is combined with fine weaving in a craft tradition.

The subjects engraved on the shell are stereotypical. They do little to suggest the conflict of Brown Eyes Blue.

They are fine jewellery but do not really make the jump into the force of art. The material, and the context of its use allied to the candied subject, make them much less powerful than the photographs.

The nature of the materials and the colour are all important in the work of veteran artist Don Peebles, at Artis Gallery until December 5.

He uses canvas that has been layered and shaped. The effect creates a landscape - a field of paint where all kinds of incidents happen.

The incidents are considered rather than random but have the spontaneity of improvisation. In a typical work, such as Moeraki III, a huge canvas is hung on the wall and marked with motifs in narrow bands.

A series of similar incidents reaches across the painting but behind it looms a darker, tenser region. We can make whatever metaphorical use we like of the contrast even as we admire the intricacy of the paintwork, decorated in one place by the little touches of red that energise the works. It makes a magisterial painting.

The layering is all important, whether it is a physical layer or the sort where the colour breaks through from beneath the surface to suggest time and experience.

The actual physical layering is seen at its best in a small work with the unpromising title Droop.

This is a theatrical work where something akin to a proscenium arch stands out from the background. In front of that is a hanging area of paint like a curtain that might part to reveal a drama.

The long experience and invention of the artist makes the most basic of materials, canvas and paint, work together to rich effect.

In two exhibitions until November 29 at the Studio of Contemporary Art in Newmarket, human interaction is presented in two different ways because of the use of different materials.

Upstairs, Have You Heard by Gennie de Lange is done entirely on glazed terracotta.

The ceramic confines the images to small slabs and limits the amount of detail.

The glazes give a luminous, polished quality, but the human figures illustrated become wraith-like. They sway towards or away from each other in a variety of poses which are generalisations about human relationships.

A special touch is that most of these interacting humans are accompanied by a dog, and because the figures are thin and strange they take on some of the skinny characteristics of the animal.

The compositions are all very similar but the moods are varied. Sunshine Days is happy, Dear Friends is intimate, Don't Worry is consoling. None are demanding but they are lively and decorative.

In the lower gallery, Exit, is an exhibition by Andrew Topp called Diamonds Among the Rough, where the materials are conventional oil paint heavily varnished. The only unusual thing is the frequent use of a diamond-shaped format.

The material is used to create a dark, moody world where male figures interact with each other melodramatically in power games.

The images, although not very expressive in themselves, are given point and supported by lettering which increases the theatricality of their arguments and tension as well as making allusions to other painters. Only conventional paint could combine figures and lettering to such good effect.

The ubiquitous I AM makes an appearance and contributes to a curious exhibition which takes a very jaundiced view of humanity's great expectations but has its moments of expressive tension.