Lafferty Artist

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 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.

 I used the ‘Chiaroscuro’ effect, dark contrasts to show volume and also to suggest rather than totally state form.

This dramatic approach creates a sense of story, leaving the viewer to fill in the shadows. 

The image is far removed from the original photo. I doubt the individual could identify themselves in it. It can also be seen as either female or male, 

 I do leave the meaning to the viewer, but if I were to suggest intent.

It is a portrait of an emotionless (possibly in shock) figure covered in blood, mysteriously just a head with no body, possibly walking straight off the stage of some Shakespearean Greek tragedy. 

A happy little moment to catch the eye.

Much better than watching unrelenting gratuitous violence on TV, also offering more questions than answers. 

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? 

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 about it is that when you look at it, it looks nothing like this.

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

 Funny how we can look at one thing and see something, when in reality, what we are looking at is something completely different. 

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.

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. 

間

An investigation into the Japanese concept of Ma. 

Taking a wrong turn with all its consequences,

Length of time depends upon our ideas.

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 as the space between heaven and earth.

Translated from Saikontan , Yuhodo, Tokyo, 1926

'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. 

Here's an old one. The original image, Havana 2004. It sold out in the Mercury Plaza Gallery Exhibition in 2022. 

Oh, I miss that place. 

And yes, I miss Cuba as well.

Beautiful people. 

I use many different media,  food, writing, and photography. I break rules. Isn't that what they are there for? 

  I move to amplify an idea, sometimes completely change an idea, to ask the viewer to question - What is it they are viewing?

 How does it make them feel?

This image is in a world where Rabbits rule. 

When man arrives and is told he is not welcome.  It leaves the question wide open: what did man do to his last world? This is a theme I return to in much of my work. 

The Rabbit is from a 2008 sculpture by my Artist sibling, Jo Raill.