OPENING PREVIEW and ARTIST TALK | Friday, 31 October from 5pm

Painting Blossoms, Miranda Joseph’s first solo exhibition, directly references nature without being a copy of it. Resolute, celebratory and immersive, we witness as well the emergence of a fully formed, unique and distinctive artistic voice.

While nominally the subject is the Japanese cherry blossom, in no way is her artistic objective or the result representational. Quite the opposite. Her works are immersive and suggestive, fluxing and momentary. In works fused with soft tones and spatial atmospheres, light is as much the sensation as it is a key narrative component. This is paralleled by the slowly arriving presence of colours and shapes, for it seems that each work coalesces, pulses and shifts as one looks up, at, and in. This conversation between actuality and perception, between substance and the spaces between, is ultimately what these most impressive – not impressionistic – paintings are ultimately about. Being there. In it. They exist so the viewer can intuit them and in that active process there is a lot of give and take, where one needs the other and the relationships morph into interconnectedness.

Now back living in Dunedin but previously resident in Japan for over a decade, she is deeply conscious of the Japanese and Western representational traditions. In her work Miranda Joseph presents fleeting subliminal essences, the patterns and structure inherent in nature and spring in particular. Her paintings speak of the human experience of seasonal nature without the artifice and constraint. This experience is multi-faceted: aesthetic harmonies arise, paralleled by the emotion of being inside the subject. Feelings of unity with nature are induced, connecting the viewer with the scene in a way in which a representational landscape could not.

These works capture the essence of blossoms, not the direct reality of them. The artist’s painting process incorporates masking and resist techniques, multiple acrylic washes, and the use of acrylic gel mediums to achieve numerous, distinct layers of slowly declaring perspectival depths. The canvas is gessoed and sanded back before a roller is used to apply a looser surface. Interaction between this layer and the non-absorbent (chalky) gesso creates an incomplete coverage of paint flecks and pits. The artist uses this semi-aleatory design as a foundation over which dots and oval shapes are masked before the surface is again rolled. Structural complexity is added and provided by masking. Acrylic medium gel shapes are then applied. Iridescent, speckled colours enable the surface to capture light in unpredictable, variable and refractory ways which are naturalistic in character. This co-joining of chance, modulating light effects and conscious artistic structural patterning decisions has Joseph’s paintings occupying a remarkable hybrid place somewhere between the world of William Morris and that of Jackson Pollock.

The results are dense yet meditative. Layer upon layer of painted, dotted and oval forms combine to create powerful illusions of three-dimensionality and sensations of envelopment. Works such as Petal Pink Blossom use metallic and pearlescent surface effects and subtleties of shade. Works shift, change, altering tone and substance as the viewer moves. The ambiguous role of spatial depth developed by the acrylic gel application amplifies the role of light in works such as Precious Blossom. Different moods and presences are developed with darker, layered tones in Moonlight Blossom and Sapphire Blossom.