Startling revelations in the flesh

Neil Dawson's imaginative use of steel mesh in Spiral Blue to Red. Picture / Kenny Rodger

On the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel is Michelangelo's huge painting of the Last Judgement. High up in heaven is St Bartholomew the martyr who, legend has it, was flayed, holding his own skin. Michelangelo painted his own tormented face on Bartholomew's skin. It is astonishing how a human being can be reduced to a skin and still retain human characteristics.

At the Gow Langsford Gallery until August 27, Christopher Braddock is exhibiting skins in a show called Fleshly Worn. These are not paintings but sculpture. Nor are they emblems of martyrdom although there is a tinge of horror about them. Instead they are celebrations of parts of the human body done in the most modern of materials - a dense white silicone related to the material of breast implants.

The thin skins, which are hung from stainless steel pegs like specimens on the wall, have matching bulging parts that at first look a little like bosoms but on close inspection prove to be knees and elbows, knuckles and heels.

The effect is startling and though the materials are modern and allow the seamless conjunction of thin skins and strong, solid, palpable forms, some of the moulded joints look as rugged as a hill. It is distantly reminiscent of the sculpture of Michelangelo and Rodin. Both allowed details of the human body to emerge from the formless stone.

The traditional masters used this sense of emergence for a variety of emotional effects while Braddock's pieces demonstrate the possibilities of the medium and delight in the clever use of detail and contrast.

One of the best of the works is 6 kilos of Phantasmagoria. Equally appropriately the fine sculpture displayed in the window is Big Stretch.

These big sculptures in silicone are accompanied by a table full of Nature Studies and a series of wall works. In these works bits of the body have been moulded in plaster, then covered with carefully stitched fabric. These buttocks and joints are symmetrically matched and do the sculptural thing that identifies body and landscape. The fabric gives the rocky shapes a soft skin.

The show has the effect of making us more aware of the shapes and tensions within our own bodies. The effect is achieved very inventively.

On the other hand, Neil Dawson whose exhibition Craters is at the Anna Bibby Gallery until August 27, makes us acutely aware of how we perceive the solidity of landscape and the hollows and thrusts of recesses, craters and excavations.

Dawson shows a virtuoso use of material - in this case, painted steel mesh, and imaginative use of perspective. The works are a series of wall sculptures. They are circular but curved to suggest the top of a hill. The circumference of each work has intriguing wave patterns of valleys. The tops of these hill shapes are pierced by illusionist devices that sometimes suggest a natural crater but, more frequently, skilfully suggest winding staircases, walls of masonry, flights of steps or amphi-theatrical structures cut into the hill.

The pieces are all painted and sometimes the colour is subtle as in Crater-Spiral, Blue to Red where the effect from the front is blue but from the side it is shaded through with a delicate red. In Bunker, the shadows reverse the four recesses at the top. In other works the steel mesh produces luminous effects that change as you approach or move away.

Two other powerful shows of sculpture combine three-dimensional creations with the use of lights and surface. At the Jensen Gallery until next month, Jim Speers has his delicately glowing light boxes on display as well as a suite of highly imaginative drawings for an underground cinema in Central Otago.

Cinema also features in a light projection work where patterns of structural steel are shown on a wall to music and dialogue from the film The Hustler.

Rather more conventionally but with considerable authority, Peter Panyoczki at the Bath Street Gallery until September 3 shows light springing from one alchemical pot to another or makes it flash around a spiral of lights embedded in steel.

These strong but simple works are surpassed by his more complex canvases in thickly textured relief. These range from the simple cracked surface of Earth to the burst of golden splendour above a brown horizon in Elements 2 and the grand golden circle imposed on a grid of texture in Patterns 2.