“Diversity”

Denise Newland and Pat Greenfield have teamed up to bring us this diverse range of crafts and mediums with no theme. Both artists work in different mediums. As such, they complement each other, thus offering the viewer a broader artistic view.

DENISE NEWLAND

This is Denise’s second exhibition at this gallery, having had a solo show in January 2017.

Denise has lived in New Plymouth for the past 30 years. Prior to coming to New Zealand she lived and worked in various countries overseas including 17 years in Canada. Born in Sydney, Australia of Maltese heritage.

She has always had an interest in art and creating and making things. Basically self taught, though has attended workshops and art classes along the way. Her inspiration comes from nature and surroundings, travels and life experiences.

Her favoured media recently has been stone carving. She has been a member of
Te Kupenga Stone Sculpture Society since 2006 and has participated in 5 Stone Sculpture Symposia on the New Plymouth foreshore. The stones exhibited in this exhibition are local andesite which is considered a hard stone on the scale, similar to granite.

Denise has painted and exhibited her work for many years and her art is in homes and gardens around the world. She loves using colour, texture and glazing effects in her paintings and has explored various other media as well, including printmaking, photography and jewellery making.

PAT GREENFIELD
This is Pat’s second exhibition to be held at the Mokau Museum.

Pat is better known for her photography, and there are four main examples of that here. However, she is really keen to show her other artistic interest, namely, mathematical art, utilizing both pen and ink and water colour painting.

At the same time as she began the Tongaporutu Project, she also started work on a fractal hypothesis of spacetime. The two examples highlighting hypercubes, were done on maths graph paper for accuracy. The other paper artworks were also done on maths graph paper, then transferred to water colour art paper for completion.

When working on paper, Pat admits to being ‘shadow blind’ in that she has difficulty in perceiving depth. Paradoxically, she has no such problem constructing 8-dimensional hypercubes, providing she utilizes the mathematical system she developed to describe spacetime as she sees it.

Pat: “In photography, I have no problem perceiving depth and don’t know why I have this stark difference of seeing between the two artistic mediums. It’s the same with music. If the music has no lyrics attached to it, then I can never recall it when not being played. Words are the anchor that I use to remember. Minus the words is equal to minus the music. As such, I can never compose music, even though I would love to be able to.

Still, rather than worry about what I can’t do, I concentrate on what I can.”