It is hovering in a zone, between taking form, registering and becoming, while also simultaneously being stubbornly out of reach, slipping from view and residing in a neverland. This is the scape that exists beyond the carriage window, a folding and whirling vaporous mass of tones, depths and wavering lines, which are momentarily interrupted by a set of indexical markers, before once more slipping to the optical margins. By my rough calculations, at least a hazard a guess, my journey has crossed the Scottish southern border. At a more instinctual level I know the glimpses of colour and pockets of nature are inherently familiar, even though I have never seen them or been here before. But even more than these momentary registrations of place, there are unerring qualities in the temperature of light and shifting weather patterns, which give shape to this reality.
—Aaron Kreisler, 2024*
Sumer is pleased to announce Pouring Light, an exhibition featuring new paintings by Tāmaki-based artist Sandra Bushby. This exhibition, her third solo show with Sumer, marks the debut of her work at the gallery's new location in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. The exhibition runs from 14 August to 14 September 2024.
In Pouring Light, Bushby draws inspiration from the late Joanna Margaret Paul (1945–2003), juxtaposing Paul's love poem Blue Fleur** with her Stations of the Cross (c. 1971), housed in St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Chapel in Kōputai Port Chalmers. Bushby’s works draw upon Paul’s vivid colours and her symbolic use of window armatures as metaphors of love and promise across both visual and verbal languages.
The exhibition comprises a series of oil paintings alongside works on paper in watercolour and gouache. Bushby views her paper works as visual diaries, documenting her experimental processes in paint. She states, "These works allow for spontaneity in concepts of colour, form, and open spaces.” And further explains that, “[her] processes are set in train by the act of listening to images;” exploring spaces between poetry and painting.
Both in her paintings and paper works, Bushby sublimates visual and verbal poetics. Her work is characterized by a rhythmic and sequential approach, where accents, stacking, and lines create a dynamic dialogue between form and meaning. And in speaking to her painterly approach, she states, "I am captivated by the way paintings acquire their distinctive qualities through processes of emergence, erasure and unpredictable renewal. I have in mind the process of something being birthed, which is then partially erased and hidden from view. It implies the adoption of painting processes that stem directly from the layering and dispersal of their own structures. As complex forms and patterns accumulate through temporal processes, pre-planned or ends-oriented methods become redundant.”
Sandra Bushby (b. 1965, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand) Lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely across Aotearoa in recent years and her work is featured in notable collections, including Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand and Auckland Museum.
* Aaron Kreisler, (nowhere / now here), in Sandra Bushby: Pouring Light (2024). Auckland: self-published [catalogue]
**in like love poems by Joanna Margaret Paul, Hall, Bernadette (Ed) (2006). Victoria University of Wellington: Victoria University press, p.76
