Words as patterns on lush woollen strips

Mary-Louise Browne (left) and Kah Bee Chow. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Mary-Louise Browne is using shorter words now. SO, NO, OH, fitted neatly on to carpet runners.

"It will devolve again down to one-letter words," says Browne, eyeing the lush strips of wool stretched out on the gallery floor.

Browne has been working with words for more than 25 years, starting at Elam with parlour-game transmutations engraved into marble paving stones.

"It is not so much the words as working with typography and working with the language of cinema," she says. "I am interested in how, when you look at a word, the word 'boy' or the word 'the', if you look at it long enough it loses all its meaning, it just looks like a thing incised on a page.

"Translated to a large scale, like a rug, after a while they end up looking like patterns. That is what I am saying, and it is the hieroglyphic thing, the fact they are pictures and they are shapes as opposed to the absolute meaning."

There is still interest in the meaning, particularly in the way words are read aloud.

One of her older works was a two-panel painting. The left panel: "All right, go ahead and look." The right: "I hope you like what you see."

"For me that is often how a viewer will approach a painting, so it is the artist getting in first and having a conversation with the viewer, from arm's length or even from another country.

"I am interested in the nature of that, the inclusiveness of it. You don't just stand back and examine the colour or the shape; it is more like the work is speaking to you."

That interest led Browne to cinema, where people construct texts to be uttered by others.

"I was watching a Nicholas Cage film; he was looking straight at the camera, emphatically telling someone to get out of the house. So you are sitting in your own home, and you have Nicholas Cage screaming at you to get out of the house, and you think a bit about your own situation, that 'Yeah, I've got to get out of the house a bit more'."

As well as working with words and ideas, Browne is a sculptor. When she discovered Christchurch firm Dilana would make one-off carpets, she had to give it a try.

"If you are working in sculpture that is always the fascination with materials. That is why I still do it - there is still that desire to work on a large scale with a very sexy material, pure New Zealand wool."

Browne shares the space with installations by Auckland University of Technology graduate Kah Bee Chow, who also draws on the language of film for an exploration of romanticism and romance.

A string of Christmas lights is strung above the windows, spelling out the word "riviera", a destination redolent of being somewhere away from the cares of the world.

A stack of romance paperbacks, their covers sanded down to white, are in a circle like a wishing well.

A video monitor shows slides from her parents' photo album, shots of happy times in foreign places.

A book with a sandpaper cover (a reference to Memoires by "situationist" Guy Debord, which was bound that way so it would destroy other books it came in contact with), includes pictures of F. Scott Fitzgerald and wife Zelda.

Chow says the Fitzgeralds' doomed romance has continued resonance. "Compromise is something couples have to do to stay together, and F. Scott and Zelda were two people who never wanted to compromise, who wanted to be young and irresponsible and live a perfectly luxurious life," she says. "I think those desires are quite current among people my age."

* Chow Browne, by Kah Bee Chow & Mary-Louise Browne is at Anna Miles Gallery, Canterbury Arcade, to July 30