Maths inspires designing woman

By ANDREW CLIFFORD

Spending a year in Dunedin as Frances Hodgkins fellow is a prestigious award - previous winners have included Ralph Hotere, Fiona Pardington, Shane Cotton, Jim Speers and Ava Seymour - but the primary benefit for Auckland painter Sara Hughes was having an entire year to focus on her work.

Hughes creates detailed geometric patterns, often computer-generated, but her work also alludes to more traditional handicraft practices, such as weaving and textile design.

Even before her fellowship began last year, she discovered Dunedin had a unique history for her to explore. "In the year before I did the fellowship, I stayed with my friend Scott Eady, who was the last fellow. He lived in a house that had a gate which was tied with a little piece of paisley."

Although Dunedin is renowned for its op-shop student culture where retro threads abound, paisley designs have a long history in this Scottish-settled city.

"I spent quite a bit of time researching ideas to do with paisley, in different motifs, patterns, meanings, trade, all those sorts of ideas, but also, quite specifically to Dunedin because there were weavers who came as early settlers and settled in an area they called Little Paisley.

"They didn't actually weave shawls there but, at that time, it was really fashionable to have an outer shawl. So they were woven in Paisley, Scotland, and a lot of early settlers broughtthem."

Even when working in paisley, mathematics plays a strong role in Hughes' work.

"I was interested in how they started as a decorative pattern but they refer very much to fractals or other sorts of shapes and forms," she explains.

"I think that idea of pattern is really interesting in lots of different structures - mathematical, geological, fabrics, or whatever they are. Sometimes the work may start with a fabric pattern but hopefully it brings in or alludes to other sorts of structures or patterns, which are circulating more prominently in digital-type codes - how we receive transmissions of images now."

You would be excused for assuming Hughes must have been one of those rare students who enjoyed school maths but she suspects her work is probably more in compensation for lack of diligence in that area. However, there is also a family influence.

"My father is a mathematician so maybe [my work] comes from that. But from me not being able to ever completely grasp it, I think it's my basic way, with this repetition, putting things on and trying to create structures, to understand things.

"In Dunedin he was wondering how I made a lot of the decisions. The work does have that more mathematical appearance, although it's more intuitively made. It was interesting talking to him about random numbers and perhaps coming up with other ways of making the work that may be based on that.

"I just liked talking to him about that idea that even true randomness is not really random. You will still get bits of pattern happening. It might take thousands of times to come up but it's interesting."

During her fellowship, Hughes also had to recreate her installation, Software for ADA, for the group show Dirty Pixels, as it toured Wellington, Hamilton and Dunedin. Originally exhibited at Auckland gallery Artspace two years ago and curated by Stella Brennan, the show explored ways the apparent perfection of digital information can become dirty when it enters the real world.

Software for ADA takes its name from Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, collaborator with inventor Charles Babbage and 19th-century mathematician. Drawing connections between the way steam-powered jacquard looms were programmed and the punch-cards of early computers, Brennan cited the resultant intricate woven designs as being the first computer graphics and Lovelace as the first computer programmer. "It was looking and thinking about those odd little interconnections that come up between weaving, mathematics, abstraction and different kinds of patterns," confirms Hughes.

As with much of her recent work, Software for ADA was applied directly to the wall but in this exhibition, Digital Mosaics, Hughes finds new ways to achieve spatial effects within the confines of a canvas.

"That visual interest and perception of how we look at things has been an ongoing interest. I did want to push that quite a lot more.

"Sometimes I think the larger the work, the easier it is to walk past, which sounds strange. It becomes part of the environment. With these works, I really wanted the viewer to be more drawn in and be focused by the edge. For these, I explore a bit more those spatial possibilities that come up when you're working with different computer programs."

Although she often plans her work on a computer and creates it with a lino-cutter, it is usually hand applied, which creates a human factor she enjoys.

"For me it's interesting to have the odd slippage. When you look at them close up there will be little brush marks or things that take them back to being a painting. So in my studio, on one side is a computer and a vinyl cutter and on the other side are paints and brushes and things.

"I'm not doing high-end, computer-type stuff but maybe it's looking more at the relationship between that and the painted image and what happens with that interaction a little more."

Exhibition

* Who: Sara Hughes, Digital Mosaics

* Where and when: June 30-July 31, Vavasour Godkin Gallery, 2nd Floor, 35 High St