Lafferty Artist

"Fog is a beautiful thing" 

I would not normally put four pictures together like this, as it is a bit of sacrilege to each to do so. But it is also the best way in a limited space to show a series.

The refracted light of the sunrise showing through the water vapour in early morning Karangahape Road made these shots  Black and White and amplifing only the brightest colours of the bus stop and the pink path. Singular figures lose identity as they turn into shadows and their actions and pose brings back identity without a face. This to me is perfect for my style and fits in with my wish to preserve individuals privacy while amplifying who they are by there shape shadow and pose. 

노은실. Eunsil Noh,

From Korea, played a free show at the old Wine Cellar in 2023. She was here for the Auckland Art Festival. Seldom have I heard a voice tuned so well that it became a musical instrument. 

 Colour theory has long been a feature in my art and cuisine since back in “The White Room” restaurant days back in the late nineties. Korean Colour theory differs from its Neighbours, Japan and China, in that White is often associated with positivity, purity, clarity, and innocence. It is often used to represent positive emotions such as happiness, joy, and hope. When I was creating this composite, I knew I had to have the also valued Gold and Reds from researching Japanese and Chinese colour theory last year, in which those colours and their meanings are closely aligned to Korean. The white surprised me, as in Japan and China, it is more associated with death. I liked the idea of making that white pronounced, especially knowing the turbulent history these three countries have with each other. 

To me, it meant celebrating this beautiful singer with her perfect note and all the colours in the image having positive, beautiful meanings. The door represents the historical background, both of the caretaker's cottage and Korea's History. Music brings people together. Beautiful music takes them somewhere else entirely. History, for a few short moments, can be left at the door. 

The image here is shown as original and also hanging in the 1853 caretakers cottage with the frame I exhibited it in. 

This is another from my recent painted faces series.

 The painted layer is a piece of corrugated iron. Scott from the band Cindy was standing on top of the bar, singing. This is an in-between-the-moments shot. 

What I like, is that when you look at the collage image  I created, it gives off a very different feel than what was  actually there - A singer taking a breath. The removal of the microphone makes all the difference. Instead of seeing passion of an artist , we see the meaning of a fist.

 It looks all agro and macho, which it isn't at all.

 Funny how we can look at one thing and see something, when 

 what we are looking at is something completely different. 

This image was taken in 1907 and is of my Sister-in laws great-grandmother. When we think of grandmothers, we often see them as we did when they were last alive, and our ideas of beauty come from the person we have known. Looking at them when they were in their youth, and seeing a different type of beauty, we open our eyes towards the lives lived throughout. The girl, the teenager, the mother, the grandmother, the matriarch to the whanau all held in different ways beauty, often but not always defined by the societal views of the aesthetic female form.

When I first saw this image, I was taken by the pose, downward-looking eyes, and it reminded me of the High Renaissance images like La Scapigliata by Leonardo da Vinci, where the submissive beauty was celebrated. Very much a sign of the times before the pride of the female profile raised the angle of the head, and feminism moved this type of pose out of vogue. This image is the first of a series of ‘painted faces’, moving identity in a photograph away from its original capture and adding to it with multiple exposures of surfaces, textures and paint. The colour Lapis lazuli (ultramarine) allures towards value and beauty, which was also added to paintings in the High Renaissance. By using the most expensive and hardest to get pigment in paintings, the paintings themselves went up in value just because of what they were made from. Many artists now use gold leaf in much the same way. 

Beauty and value are such transient subjective terms. They change with the views held by the person viewing. Conversations about these preconceptions and understanding what we are looking at are important. This is one of the central aims of this series. 

It is not just a pretty face, and it is also no longer just a photograph.

Why is it that bad news travels faster

than good news? 

Why do we have a negative bias? 

Why are we waiting for the next disaster? 

I don't have answers to any of this.

But impending doom does seem to be just

around the corner. 

We live in a media-scape that peddles fear. 

Like a boy swimming in a hurricane -

How the hell could it get any worse? 

All  three images in this row are also following my recent process of amplifying  textures from surfaces which have been in the image, or using a multiple exposure of a texture close by.

The last Red wall was just a lucky shot :-)

No Multiple exposures needed. 

There is something about breaking the rules that always captivates me when I take a photograph. It's like that bad boy sitting at the back of the class - the teacher says to place the subject in the middle of the viewfinder, and I think, "But Miss, can’t I position the subject as if they are walking out of the frame?" When I reflect on my childhood, I often remember being reprimanded by a female teacher. Perhaps they were simply more memorable to me than the grumpy male ones (who knows). Regardless, I never paid much attention to the rules.

I was taking this image at 60 sec, so when I spun around to capture the person the opposite way they were walking, I ended up capturing their movement like they were running, and the starkly recently painted and rained on red wall in perfect focus. 

It is everything that is a bit wrong about this picture that makes it right.

Well, to me, the bad boy at the back of the class.

I wrote a book, just one. 

On one level it is

10 years of photography reimagined in multiple exposures on Karangahape Road, printed page by page, hand-made as a single piece of Art with sustainable materials.

On another level, it is a large collection of conversation thought processes on those people, their cultures as they arrived, survived and thrived, eventually departing from this road. 

At its core, the subject is sustaining a presence for individuals and groups on this road. Its formation has been to make one book rather than publish many. To have one artifact that can be exhibited and cherished by many rather than many books that may come and go from people's coffee tables, be read without a care, or not even read, which sadly is the life of many books brought as many  presents are, flipped through and delegated to a shelf to collect dust.

Anyway, it is too big to go on most shelves.

間

An investigation into the Japanese concept of Ma. 

Taking a wrong turn with all its consequences.

On one level, this is an investigation into space. On another, it is a choice. Which to perceive, which to believe is real. Which road to take. If your mind is free all choices are the right choice. Direction is a perception, as is whether two things can exist in one place at one time. 

"Length of time depends upon our ideas.

The size of space hangs upon our sentiments.

For one whose mind is free from care,

A day will outlast the millennium.

For one whose heart is large,

A tiny room is the space between heaven and earth."

Translated from Saikontan , Yuhodo, Tokyo, 1926

In 2018, I lay in this park with friends where a Pa once stood in Korero with a talented Orator, Pita Turei. He spoke of another time, a history of the ground I lay I did not know. A seed was sown, a desire to know more about Aotearoa, not the history I had grown up with, but the longer history of this place and the people before.

I was a returning traveller and yearned to know more about where I came from.

5 years on,  I  lay under a Ginkgo tree, not far from the old Pa site. I felt the presence and history of the earth beneath me, upon seeing this beautiful foreigner, a coloniser in its own way. I appreciated the beauty of this Japanese tree,  at the same time reflecting that many trees that had lived here before, witness to times and peoples, wars and peace. I slowed my breathing, taking in the loss of past times and the people who had called this place home.

This photographic compilation of a girl in two poses under the ginkgo tree expresses the thoughts going through my head, experienced that day. No more a foreigner coming home or a foreigner in a faraway land like this tree. 

'What once was', is a snapshot of looking at time. The fisherman stands in his canoe as many do in 'Lago Santiago Atitlan'  as they have for hundreds of years. Stuck in his ways, he becomes timeless. He looks back at things as they were,  Colonial states that have come and gone.

 A statue, a Renaissance piece, based on a much older Greek myth.
In the present are the birds and the foreground, and splashes of water. The rising tide with its grand wave at the front is a hint towards my Gaia beliefs that nature will take everything back, also hinting towards global warming, as some of my other works do.
I wanted to create a small

vintage oil painting, out of time,  possibly like one on your grandparents' wall. 

This is probably not one I can sell. Well, the image, yes, but the lyrics are 'Tom Scott's. 

From Avandale Bowling Club.

Let's hear it for the boy crawling on the floor
In an Orwellian Estate Hall he walked
In '85, he ran and in '86 we flew
From a kingdom united into a land in two
In '87 we settled, In '88 we moved
Into a place called Avondale, first day in school
In '89, it was me, myself, and I

This is a new approach I am taking in mixing text with images. A work in progress

 In future, both mine.

Let's see where it goes.