From mouldy wood to pretty microbes

By PAOLA GHIRELLI

Artist Abbie Read lives and breathes bacteria. She's gone from the Spice Girls to microbes and from London to Auckland.

In London she left a glam job at a Soho production company where she made videos and commercials for MTV and major music labels.

"I won't say too much about that time but there were some rock-chick moments, like dancing on the roof of a Hyde Park hotel watching the sun come up with the band members from Alice Cooper."

After four years of travelling, English-born Read, 34, settled in New Zealand.

She gave up the idea of sitting in a small, dark editing suite back home to tap another creative vein and start a fine arts degree here.

The artist's bacterial fascination began in 1997 with a simple travel photo she took of a piece of mouldy wood in Tibet.

"While everyone else was busy chasing monks for photos, I was taken by the features in the wood," she says. "It was simply beautiful.

"I even ended up using those colours as a palette for my work.

"I do the whole opposing art-and-science stuff with bacteria and use different media to express this, making each of my works unique.

"One of my pieces has 800 antique test tubes filled with pigments and resin that form mandala patterns. If you move, it moves.

"I have also made a piece out of 100 labels that are painted front and back in bacterial textures against a pristine white background in real-life formations illustrating the clinical versus the organic."

Auckland's Paramount restaurant, under the New Art Gallery, houses Read's individual bacterial portraits set in resin.

She likes to manipulate the viewer to see them as scientific experiments through little peepholes. The bacteria aren't real - they are painted in the image of micro-organisms.

As part of her New Zealand exhibition she has built an extraordinary "museum" out of perspex and glass.

There is also a stunning 2.7m lightbox which is all about osteoporosis and the idea that everything has a finite amount of time before it disintegrates. In this case she illustrates this with the decay of bones.

And it doesn't stop there. In London's Pall Mall, her part of the Discerning Eye exhibition opened exactly 12 hours after her New Zealand show.

The London show is part of an annual exhibition where six big-wigs - two famous artists, two critics and two collectors from the British art world - are invited to curate their own mini shows.

This year broadcaster, journalist and writer Mark Lawson (who penned the TV political thriller Absolute Power) selected Read as his hot new thing.

"It's all a bit of a coup really," she says. "I have carefully flown some pieces over for it. Ghostly bacterial textures on layers of glass and paint plus pigment and ink encased in bacterial resin."

Exhibition

*Who: Abbie Read

*What: Transient

*Where: In Auckland - Randolph Street Studios, Newton; in London - Discerning Eye, Pall Mall

*Website: Abbie Read