Highly mobile whirl of form and colour

American artist Pae White's coloured paper mobile installation at Sue Crockford Gallery. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Pae White had been in Auckland barely a day but she had already gone out to the eastern suburbs to install a private commission, then on to lead a team of assistants through the installation of her solo exhibition at Sue Crockford Gallery.

Crockford says White is the most efficient artist she knows.

White seems relaxed and happy to leave the three helpers threading coloured pieces of paper while she looks over other elements of the exhibition.

A large, carved piece of plywood on the floor, waiting to be attached to the wall, catches her eye. It is engraved in different styles with texts referring to home-made remedies.

She describes it as a sampler, but White is not a nostalgic revivalist of traditional techniques.

She says her use of low-tech methods, especially making mobiles from coloured paper, is not a reflection of a childhood filled with handicraft activities.

"I wasn't really engaged in this stuff when I was young. It was a much more traditional pen-and-paper type thing. I think everything changed for me when I was in a class in college that was a mixed media class. All of a sudden I didn't have to have the pencil and paper and paint and canvas, or anything like that, and this became a possibility."

She laughs at the suggestion of conventional woodturners who like to show off their virtuosity, painstakingly incorporating as many techniques as possible into a single piece.

"It's kind of sad because, in relation to that, this is all done by a machine," she says. "This took 10 hours' work."

Based on a simple line drawing, the work gains textures and patterns from the layers of plywood showing through, a result of a mechanical process applied to a specific material.

"I instructed the fabricators to see it as like a sample-board of the process of this machine," she says.

This exploration of technique is typical of much of White's work and her instructions were open enough to allow the process to create the results.

Lately, she has been working with tapestries, translating images of metallic surfaces and three-dimensional forms into woven textiles by putting crinkled foils and other materials into a computer scanner.

"I wanted something that looked so hand-done but so impossibly hand-done, like something that only an alien could have made," she says of this strange mix of hand-made and mechanical processes, which began with a stage curtain commissioned for an opera house in Oslo.

"I was trying to have this really basic polycotton struggle with transformation and struggle with being metal or struggle with being plastic, and see if it can do that.

"I have one I really like that is all foil and it's a bedspread. It's a perfectly nice bedspread material but it's very cold upfront in person. It's really mechanical, which I actually really like."

Preferring to develop work specifically for each exhibition, she describes her samplers as archives, not only of techniques and materials, but also of the circumstances that led to the work's making.

An enormous typographical mural on show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery was inspired by the wall's fire hose, which she wasn't able to remove or conceal.

"I wanted to have the whole piece really focus on this thing that we were trying to pretend wasn't there," she says.

She also has work at the Shanghai Biennale, which, she says, was an opportunity to work with a fabricator in China and explore the country's reputation for industrialisation and imitation.

As part of the project, she had a group of five images made into paintings.

"It was something that seemed like a good way to engage the situation in China, rather than just a way to manufacture some art, and still test the skills of the country.

"They made five paintings from these photographs and then they made five paintings from the paintings, so the images started to break down. That was part of the negotiation in order for them to do it and not feel like they were being ripped off, because they get to keep five paintings.

"The paintings are incredibly eerie because they are very un-emotive."

An image she considered particularly apt was of Disneyland's small world display. "I have a big fascination with that, especially in terms of it reducing these cultures into stylisations."

Next year White will participate in Germany's Munster Sculpture Project, which has taken place every 10 years since 1977.

One of the proposals she is working on will use Munster's five church bells. Like her mobiles, the work will have scale and yet be virtually non-existent.

"It's this idea that the sculpture could reach all the places in the city at the same point [in time]. So you could hear this and then it kind of disappears."


* New work for NZ, by Pae White, Sue Crockford Gallery, 2 Queen St, to Oct 21