Running wild across gene pools

By MALCOLM BURGESS

Joanna Braithwaite has been hard at work in the studio, of that there's little doubt. The real question is, what has she been doing?

The obvious answer is making the art that forms her new series, Wild Things, but there is also the suspicion she has been splicing, dicing and tinkering with various gene pools with the kind of abandon usually only possible with paint.

Certainly, with events in the realm of genetics, someone has to chart the resonances that strange new life forms are likely to have on their surroundings. While scientists think of what can be done, the artist is often freer to contemplate the unspoken fears lying just below the radar of such eventualities.

Never mind if it can be done - how will it feel? Will a half-sheep, half-dog chase itself until it drops from tiredness? Does a spiny puffer fish dream of religious ecstasy or yearn for something beyond the frame?

Braithwaite's new series may not ask these questions directly, but you might find yourself pondering them after surveying the show.

Her explanation is rather more humble and mundane. "It's an ongoing investigation into people and animals coming together and the relationship that forms," she says.

Such "hybrid-type morphing", as she calls it, is not new fare for this Cantabrian expat, who lives with her artist partner, Neil Frazer, in Sydney. "It's something I've revisited for many, many years. It is part of a journey and I keep coming back to it."

While hard to see at first, there is an autobiographical element behind these fantastic beasts. "A lot of the animal images I tend to use have some kind of personal significance.

"Like the sheep, for example, which recur constantly. That's about where I grew up, in rural south Canterbury. My parents allowed us to have whatever kind of animals we wanted to have - pigs, goats, hens, sheep, ducks, everything."

Where there's nature, there is also nurture to consider, even for beasts born of the strangest circumstances. Her paintings seem to draw in equal measure on the radically different fauna of her adopted Australia for inspiration.

A prime example are the knotted serpentine swans of Snake/Swan, which the experience of holding a snake at a wildlife sanctuary helped to spawn.

However, it is the backgrounds, many a deep nocturnal black, that remind you her work is more about the imagination than actual sightings or places.

"I like the idea that perhaps these species might come out only at night," she says. "The idea that when you're a kid, other things might go on when you're not looking."

The symbol of the egg also looms large. "One of the things I'm really interested in is time, and time passing. I'm also interested in things being born and things dying." Her father's death helped to reinforce the idea of the fragility of the body, she says.

But she is most well known for her peculiar way of extracting emotional forces and reattributing them. In Egg Man - Prey, for example, an egg balances on a branch, its fragility and surface tension cleverly refocused on the branch as it nears breaking point.

Just as she chooses from animalistic elements like colours from a palette, Braithwaite plumbs a wide pool of painterly forbears for influence.

These range from the techniques of Goya and Velasquez to contemporary artists such as John Curran. Then there is Eric Fischl, who "picks really good moments to paint", and let's not forget Carravaggio. "It's not necessarily a religious kind of thing. I really like a lot of early religious works where there is a feeling there is something outside of the painting. I feel like they are looking to what's beyond, to some God figure."

From science to religion, New Zealand to Australia, Christchurch to Auckland, periodic relocation of style and environs seems to have become something of a habit for Braithwaite.

She has lived in Sydney for nearly four years, showing with the Darren Knight Gallery and also exhibiting frequently in her homeland.

"It's been a really good experience painting away from New Zealand for a while. There are different influences and different expectations in a different place. It's funny, I didn't realise until I left New Zealand that I was working with an awareness of what people had come to expect of me."

She is not complaining, though. In Australia, on the other hand, "nobody had any expectations of me - which is tricky because I rely on the fact that my [New Zealand] audience knows what has come before. They don't over there, which keeps you trying and keeps you thinking."

No matter how immersed in Australia she may become, Braithwaite can't escape a sense of where she has come from and the perspective that accompanies it.

"I've noticed that with other ex-Kiwis who are painting in Sydney there is a lot in all our work of looking back to New Zealand."

On show

* What: Wild Things, by Joanna Braithwaite

* Where and when: Milford Galleries, 26 Kitchener St, to November 24