http://tynegordon.com/about daily 0.75 2025-12-02 http://tynegordon.com/contact daily 0.75 2015-08-05 http://tynegordon.com/writing daily 0.75 2016-05-17 http://tynegordon.com/writing-2 daily 0.75 2025-10-08 http://tynegordon.com/about-1 daily 0.75 2016-08-24 http://tynegordon.com/writing-1 daily 0.75 2016-08-24 http://tynegordon.com/new-page daily 0.75 2016-12-21 http://tynegordon.com/tyne-gordon daily 1.0 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/c475e197-aab2-43e9-a548-138c1c534dd2/CAG_exh_1149_0035.jpg all the courses of the suns - bright waters - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/65a6f34e-0b9b-4235-98ca-fcfbb767f059/CAG_exh_1149_0034.jpg all the courses of the suns - bright waters - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/17fb95d3-edaf-487b-9b3f-ce7501778a38/CAG_exh_1149_0554-Enhanced-NR.jpg all the courses of the suns - bright waters - Make it stand out All the Courses of the Suns 2023. Found objects (washing machine agitators, beach umbrella prongs), concrete, resin, grout, tiles, ribbon, tinsel). 1750 x 1800mm. Bright Waters 2023. Oil on aluminium, sand cast pewter frame. 1250 x 1800mm. https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/spring-time-is-heart-break https://artnow.nz/essays/reality-has-an-ephemeral-quality '“Some works in Spring Time is Heart-break connect to discernible narratives, while others shift kaleidoscopically in their own being, apparently independent of any stable, self-assured utterance or subjectivity. There is a confidence in their self-evidential qualities, but they are not independent of all narrative; stories emerge from the gathered, altered and joined materials in the imaginations of their beholders. In Animal Joy, psychoanalyst Naur Alsadir explains how objects or beings contain and emit registers of information that, in turn, spark perception in us. Alpha elements involve the expression of organised thought, whereas beta elements are raw emotional data that is processed by us to become available for thought. Beta elements pass between people who are close – a parent and an infant, lovers, friends, siblings – but also strangers on the street, on the subway, at the checkout counter of a store. We project and contain beta elements, and perform alpha functions on those elements, without being conscious of doing so. Having read this before seeing this exhibition, I see beta-rich objects everywhere – material, visual, aural, documentary – with discomforting emotions and sensation fixed into them by artists with practised facility for working at the level of intuitive knowledge production. Tyne Gordon’s All the Courses of the Suns, work made from what looks like an umbrella skeleton and a washing machine agitator, with the aid of some air-drying concrete, or tile and grout that placed itself into a Byron Bay mosaic, makes its materials a distant memory. It may as well be the manifestation of the affective labour dream of a beach umbrella (wash, feed, watch, shelter) – it laughs at root causes, and its goodness, as Simone Weil asserted, exists (can only exist) in its self-less-ness. This work (its name cribbed from a sundial) seems to whisper to some of the others, who agree, that the artist (any artist) is not the entity that produced any of these objects. They contain the externalised knowledge of a hallucinated trans-human form from the middle of a story that is as valid as any of our supposedly real existences.” Gwynneth Porter Mar 27 2024 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/65a6f34e-0b9b-4235-98ca-fcfbb767f059/CAG_exh_1149_0034.jpg all the courses of the suns - bright waters - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/c475e197-aab2-43e9-a548-138c1c534dd2/CAG_exh_1149_0035.jpg all the courses of the suns - bright waters - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/17fb95d3-edaf-487b-9b3f-ce7501778a38/CAG_exh_1149_0554-Enhanced-NR.jpg all the courses of the suns - bright waters - Make it stand out All the Courses of the Suns 2023. Found objects (washing machine agitators, beach umbrella prongs), concrete, resin, grout, tiles, ribbon, tinsel). 1750 x 1800mm. Bright Waters 2023. Oil on aluminium, sand cast pewter frame. 1250 x 1800mm. https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/spring-time-is-heart-break https://artnow.nz/essays/reality-has-an-ephemeral-quality '“Some works in Spring Time is Heart-break connect to discernible narratives, while others shift kaleidoscopically in their own being, apparently independent of any stable, self-assured utterance or subjectivity. There is a confidence in their self-evidential qualities, but they are not independent of all narrative; stories emerge from the gathered, altered and joined materials in the imaginations of their beholders. In Animal Joy, psychoanalyst Naur Alsadir explains how objects or beings contain and emit registers of information that, in turn, spark perception in us. Alpha elements involve the expression of organised thought, whereas beta elements are raw emotional data that is processed by us to become available for thought. Beta elements pass between people who are close – a parent and an infant, lovers, friends, siblings – but also strangers on the street, on the subway, at the checkout counter of a store. We project and contain beta elements, and perform alpha functions on those elements, without being conscious of doing so. Having read this before seeing this exhibition, I see beta-rich objects everywhere – material, visual, aural, documentary – with discomforting emotions and sensation fixed into them by artists with practised facility for working at the level of intuitive knowledge production. Tyne Gordon’s All the Courses of the Suns, work made from what looks like an umbrella skeleton and a washing machine agitator, with the aid of some air-drying concrete, or tile and grout that placed itself into a Byron Bay mosaic, makes its materials a distant memory. It may as well be the manifestation of the affective labour dream of a beach umbrella (wash, feed, watch, shelter) – it laughs at root causes, and its goodness, as Simone Weil asserted, exists (can only exist) in its self-less-ness. This work (its name cribbed from a sundial) seems to whisper to some of the others, who agree, that the artist (any artist) is not the entity that produced any of these objects. They contain the externalised knowledge of a hallucinated trans-human form from the middle of a story that is as valid as any of our supposedly real existences.” Gwynneth Porter Mar 27 2024 http://tynegordon.com/new-page-2 daily 0.75 2025-10-07 http://tynegordon.com/silo-1 daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1710659889877-RQ8P748M7B2LSZMMTW75/IMG_7466.JPG bell - Make it stand out Bell, 2023. Glass, mixed materials. 915 x 320 x 320mm. SILO, Jane Wallace https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1710808587985-DTA0W64TMYPOGEICXY2L/IMG_7464.JPG bell - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1710808587985-DTA0W64TMYPOGEICXY2L/IMG_7464.JPG bell - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1710659889877-RQ8P748M7B2LSZMMTW75/IMG_7466.JPG bell - Make it stand out Bell, 2023. Glass, mixed materials. 915 x 320 x 320mm. SILO, Jane Wallace http://tynegordon.com/wishbone daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1e875da1-2c3f-4bf2-971d-9f3fd03645cb/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_wishbone_install_8.webp wishbone - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/4f4bbdb6-d4e3-4a1a-84d1-c4f0d0252453/_AVP8935.JPEG wishbone - Make it stand out Wishbone, 2025. Plasterboard and ink, 200 x 165mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/64e649ce-9a3e-4beb-a95e-95daadffcc5a/_AVP8931.JPEG wishbone - Make it stand out Bow, 2025. Ink on plasterboard. 245 x 190mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/9b9a74a1-a698-46b1-b240-734e98ba9182/jhanamillersgallery-tyne-gordon-wishbone-2025.jpg wishbone - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/ad1ee11d-a53e-47bc-b9ec-495bee107c99/jhanamillersgallery-tyne-gordon-7-2025.jpg wishbone - Make it stand out 7, 2025. Ink on plasterboard. 245 x 190mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/af974b4c-d4b4-417b-b4e8-e2a53ad6b4e5/_AVP8942.JPEG wishbone - Make it stand out Comber, 2025. Oil on aluminium, plasterboard. 460 x 360mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/af974b4c-d4b4-417b-b4e8-e2a53ad6b4e5/_AVP8942.JPEG wishbone - Make it stand out Comber, 2025. Oil on aluminium, plasterboard. 460 x 360mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/4f4bbdb6-d4e3-4a1a-84d1-c4f0d0252453/_AVP8935.JPEG wishbone - Make it stand out Wishbone, 2025. Plasterboard and ink, 200 x 165mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/9b9a74a1-a698-46b1-b240-734e98ba9182/jhanamillersgallery-tyne-gordon-wishbone-2025.jpg wishbone - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/ad1ee11d-a53e-47bc-b9ec-495bee107c99/jhanamillersgallery-tyne-gordon-7-2025.jpg wishbone - Make it stand out 7, 2025. Ink on plasterboard. 245 x 190mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/64e649ce-9a3e-4beb-a95e-95daadffcc5a/_AVP8931.JPEG wishbone - Make it stand out Bow, 2025. Ink on plasterboard. 245 x 190mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1e875da1-2c3f-4bf2-971d-9f3fd03645cb/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_wishbone_install_8.webp wishbone - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. http://tynegordon.com/twins daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/b692a543-0aa0-40b7-b286-4ff7ed8eb1bb/twins.jpg twins - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/b916e0c6-68f3-4848-b7ae-92a937a5981e/bulletin.jpg twins - Make it stand out Twins, 2019. Oil on board, cast body filler. Commissioned for Pagework no.43, The Bulletin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/b692a543-0aa0-40b7-b286-4ff7ed8eb1bb/twins.jpg twins - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/b916e0c6-68f3-4848-b7ae-92a937a5981e/bulletin.jpg twins - Make it stand out Twins, 2019. Oil on board, cast body filler. Commissioned for Pagework no.43, The Bulletin. http://tynegordon.com/double-dribble-1 daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/9df263b8-51c2-41eb-91c7-809c2b5e2f56/Installation+Shot-4.jpg double dribble - Make it stand out Double Dribble, 2019. SoFA, Ilam campus gallery, Christchurch. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/9df263b8-51c2-41eb-91c7-809c2b5e2f56/Installation+Shot-4.jpg double dribble - Make it stand out Double Dribble, 2019. SoFA, Ilam campus gallery, Christchurch. http://tynegordon.com/zone daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1554670235771-D6KKLN9JCU9L3URIYCEG/Tyne-7+copy.jpg zone - alley - Make it stand out Zone 1-3-1, 2019. Oil on board, cast plaster. 255 x 205mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1554674796426-QMCPWPCUSK5K2C9G53SD/alley-oop5.jpg zone - alley - Make it stand out Alley-oop 5, 2019. Oil on board, cast resin mixed media. 205 x 255mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1554670165279-E653GYFXHSPVGW5LRFJS/TYNE-17.jpg zone - alley - Make it stand out Zone 3-1-4, 2019. Oil on board, cast pewter. 255 x 205mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1554670235771-D6KKLN9JCU9L3URIYCEG/Tyne-7+copy.jpg zone - alley - Make it stand out Zone 1-3-1, 2019. Oil on board, cast plaster. 255 x 205mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1554674796426-QMCPWPCUSK5K2C9G53SD/alley-oop5.jpg zone - alley - Make it stand out Alley-oop 5, 2019. Oil on board, cast resin mixed media. 205 x 255mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1554670165279-E653GYFXHSPVGW5LRFJS/TYNE-17.jpg zone - alley - Make it stand out Zone 3-1-4, 2019. Oil on board, cast pewter. 255 x 205mm. http://tynegordon.com/moth daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646435692642-75UJMH4VQS1QE6T60PT2/F9510088-F3D9-4406-8F19-BFFDF6452113.JPG moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646435772063-WGMNYQ74P68U29RD8RAJ/2+Moth_detail.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Moth, 2022. Found objects, mixed media, 620 x 390 x 390mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/4a11519a-570c-4c72-8152-b651fc4df897/3+Carapace_e.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Carapace, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast resin mixed media. 215 x 168mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646434629501-GIVU77DEFM6Q9IOMP9XW/10+Monotreme_1.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Monotreme, 2022. Found objects, mixed media. 1020 x 370 x 370mm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646435188081-V7LDL803VDI2CMZNPTYB/3+Carapace_side+view.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646434629501-GIVU77DEFM6Q9IOMP9XW/10+Monotreme_1.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Monotreme, 2022. Found objects, mixed media. 1020 x 370 x 370mm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646435692642-75UJMH4VQS1QE6T60PT2/F9510088-F3D9-4406-8F19-BFFDF6452113.JPG moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646435188081-V7LDL803VDI2CMZNPTYB/3+Carapace_side+view.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/4a11519a-570c-4c72-8152-b651fc4df897/3+Carapace_e.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Carapace, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast resin mixed media. 215 x 168mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646435772063-WGMNYQ74P68U29RD8RAJ/2+Moth_detail.jpg moth - carapace - monotreme - Make it stand out Moth, 2022. Found objects, mixed media, 620 x 390 x 390mm. http://tynegordon.com/new-page-3 daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508830348-379DIW2E1M47MAJT7WVN/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_prize_1+%281%29.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Prize IIII, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508419475-9SGX45PBY0CS9HRM0U3C/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_sourdust_install_3.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Prize I-IIII, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm Reflector, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm Fountain, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508813003-CAIIXJRCW214HQKCUU3Y/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_propellor_3.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Propellor, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. Sourdust, 2022. Jhana Millers Gallery, Wellington. BLOOD BLOSSOM: WORDS FOR TYNE GORDON’S SOURDUST An encounter with beauty, Elaine Scarry writes, acquaints us to the mental event of conviction, a condition that impels an ongoing struggle to locate enduring forms of this feeling.1 This is to say that it might be energetic, convulsive, an electric shock to the system. I sense that this is also true when confronted with other emotions at extremes. The devastation of beauty is delivered through awe, and uncoincidentally, the perception of awe indicates the advent of fear too: awesome and awful are divided by a very narrow chasm. This dichotomy between terror and carnival underscores Tyne Gordon’s show Sourdust, a body of work which is at once airborne and gutterbound. A shock; a pulse of survival. How do we stay with this feeling, or find a source for it so as to make it immortal? There is something analogous to mining going on in Tyne’s work, divining through wrought territories for things that vibrate with evidence of earlier instances of the sacred. And so, this is a search that is about looking before, for precedents. We travel backwards, chronologically. Now, time-keeping is implicated; an excavation with a sundial. The annals cry, dredged from a murky grave and cast into a new one, framed by peat and concrete. Underground, a tablet throbs with information buried for another epoch. As if screens or recording devices, the paintings in Sourdust are able to broadcast from somewhere deep below into the contemporary, and back from there as well. There is a transtemporal dialogue present, embedded in the energy of debris crystallised in the works’ frames and built-up textures that have calcified through months of scavenging and layering. This is not astral, but an intense tuning-in to the frequencies of particles as they have existed throughout time. In several works, the skin of a ribbon has been pressed to the surface, so that in places, its metallic coating has flecked off. This indexical relationship means that the physicality of the object is intrinsic to the work–a loose and looping memory of a past party. The same is true for the subtle woodcut prints that are bedded in the backgrounds of Sourdust. Prize II bursts outward as a radial wound. The resulting image is formed by a visible configuration of positive and negative. Pressed to the painting, the ribbon resembles language. It is matter that can uncoil from the tongue and be endlessly reconfigured. Across Chlorine, it is a diagonal filament into its depths; conversely, the marks in Channel are tight and broken. They hold a latent hum, like a swarm of winged insects or vibrating atoms, or the swill of silt and dirt that remains when you take the plug out of the sink and let it empty down the drain. This compressed motion is charged with kinetic potential: migrating, dispersing, seething, a murmuration of painterly missiles. Siouxsie Sioux, in the Banshees’ single “Dazzle,” sings skating bullets on angel dust / in a dead sea of fluid mercury. A chain of diamonds, studded into the pixels of the clip, studded into Sioux’s eyelids, melt into a silver pool, their cut-throat facets of the verse earlier now toxic fluid. As with the ribbon forms on the surface of Tyne’s paintings, the slippage between states is a mode of communication unto itself, not illustrative, but a thing to follow beyond the bounds of the song. It is akin to the effect of slowing down a stream of water until it falls in beads, but in the inverse, speeding solid matter up until it is a cascade. That which is beautiful is often re-coded as portent of horror, and more specifically, of a domestic kind, where innocence and familiarity are distorted behind closed doors. Outside, high sun is blaring, yet the curtains are drawn and the television is on. Rosy is seared by the caustic mood of a migraine or a comedown. It is always too bright, too loud. A wing of buttermilk thrashes the centre of Rosy, blurring the divide between its light and dark sides. The title reminds me of plague and the gentle melding of nursery rhyme and death, and so this pale yellow focal point reads as a spectre passing through two realms. Sourdust’s ribbony reach is a topographical guide for these worlds. These are paintings that offer a way to stand at the precipice, and stay there, just long enough to throw a rock into its cavern and hear it ricochet at the bottom. Jane Wallace https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508425310-W29EK710LZAD0NOLFBRE/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_sourdust_install_list.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Channel, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. Rosy, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. Propellor, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508425310-W29EK710LZAD0NOLFBRE/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_sourdust_install_list.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Channel, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. Rosy, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. Propellor, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508419475-9SGX45PBY0CS9HRM0U3C/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_sourdust_install_3.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Prize I-IIII, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm Reflector, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm Fountain, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508830348-379DIW2E1M47MAJT7WVN/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_prize_1+%281%29.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Prize IIII, 2023. Oil on copper, cast resin and encaustic wax. 220 x 170mm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1673508813003-CAIIXJRCW214HQKCUU3Y/jhanamillersartgallerywellington_tynegordon_propellor_3.jpg sourdust - Make it stand out Propellor, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast concrete frame. 50 x 35mm. Sourdust, 2022. Jhana Millers Gallery, Wellington. BLOOD BLOSSOM: WORDS FOR TYNE GORDON’S SOURDUST An encounter with beauty, Elaine Scarry writes, acquaints us to the mental event of conviction, a condition that impels an ongoing struggle to locate enduring forms of this feeling.1 This is to say that it might be energetic, convulsive, an electric shock to the system. I sense that this is also true when confronted with other emotions at extremes. The devastation of beauty is delivered through awe, and uncoincidentally, the perception of awe indicates the advent of fear too: awesome and awful are divided by a very narrow chasm. This dichotomy between terror and carnival underscores Tyne Gordon’s show Sourdust, a body of work which is at once airborne and gutterbound. A shock; a pulse of survival. How do we stay with this feeling, or find a source for it so as to make it immortal? There is something analogous to mining going on in Tyne’s work, divining through wrought territories for things that vibrate with evidence of earlier instances of the sacred. And so, this is a search that is about looking before, for precedents. We travel backwards, chronologically. Now, time-keeping is implicated; an excavation with a sundial. The annals cry, dredged from a murky grave and cast into a new one, framed by peat and concrete. Underground, a tablet throbs with information buried for another epoch. As if screens or recording devices, the paintings in Sourdust are able to broadcast from somewhere deep below into the contemporary, and back from there as well. There is a transtemporal dialogue present, embedded in the energy of debris crystallised in the works’ frames and built-up textures that have calcified through months of scavenging and layering. This is not astral, but an intense tuning-in to the frequencies of particles as they have existed throughout time. In several works, the skin of a ribbon has been pressed to the surface, so that in places, its metallic coating has flecked off. This indexical relationship means that the physicality of the object is intrinsic to the work–a loose and looping memory of a past party. The same is true for the subtle woodcut prints that are bedded in the backgrounds of Sourdust. Prize II bursts outward as a radial wound. The resulting image is formed by a visible configuration of positive and negative. Pressed to the painting, the ribbon resembles language. It is matter that can uncoil from the tongue and be endlessly reconfigured. Across Chlorine, it is a diagonal filament into its depths; conversely, the marks in Channel are tight and broken. They hold a latent hum, like a swarm of winged insects or vibrating atoms, or the swill of silt and dirt that remains when you take the plug out of the sink and let it empty down the drain. This compressed motion is charged with kinetic potential: migrating, dispersing, seething, a murmuration of painterly missiles. Siouxsie Sioux, in the Banshees’ single “Dazzle,” sings skating bullets on angel dust / in a dead sea of fluid mercury. A chain of diamonds, studded into the pixels of the clip, studded into Sioux’s eyelids, melt into a silver pool, their cut-throat facets of the verse earlier now toxic fluid. As with the ribbon forms on the surface of Tyne’s paintings, the slippage between states is a mode of communication unto itself, not illustrative, but a thing to follow beyond the bounds of the song. It is akin to the effect of slowing down a stream of water until it falls in beads, but in the inverse, speeding solid matter up until it is a cascade. That which is beautiful is often re-coded as portent of horror, and more specifically, of a domestic kind, where innocence and familiarity are distorted behind closed doors. Outside, high sun is blaring, yet the curtains are drawn and the television is on. Rosy is seared by the caustic mood of a migraine or a comedown. It is always too bright, too loud. A wing of buttermilk thrashes the centre of Rosy, blurring the divide between its light and dark sides. The title reminds me of plague and the gentle melding of nursery rhyme and death, and so this pale yellow focal point reads as a spectre passing through two realms. Sourdust’s ribbony reach is a topographical guide for these worlds. These are paintings that offer a way to stand at the precipice, and stay there, just long enough to throw a rock into its cavern and hear it ricochet at the bottom. Jane Wallace http://tynegordon.com/new-page-4 daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/df07fcb1-4de8-4256-a3bb-4bf91d22a165/9+Socket_e.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Socket, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast resin mixed media. 210 x 165mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646434670744-JYD9YLNYLNVYDTRUZVE3/12+Lilo+1.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646434918580-0E1DZQ6HNGJIQUYL3BO2/installation4.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Lilo, 2022. Found material, tiles, grout, plaster. 1500 x 600mm x 100mm. Watery Grave, 2022. Oil on aluminium and cast pewter frame. 1260 x 1260mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/fdea13c5-5e75-434e-a13a-b5adbe0a1eec/4+Scanner_e.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Scanner, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast resin mixed media. 280 x 225mm. Wet Plate, 2022. Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. ELIXIR LAKE, Recently, I have been swimming laps again. At the bottom of the pool swills a layer of sediment from the poolside peripheral, leaves and dirt cast in by overhanging trees, debris of plastic, latex and cotton, filaments shedded from nylon swimming togs, an occasional flake of silver or bead lost to the rhythmic suctioning of the filter. I am another substance in this soup, an amalgamation of strands of hair, skin cells, saliva, chlorine, sunscreen. The poolscape is contained by a border of blue concrete aggregate, a modest imitation of the colour of the ocean. From bird’s eye, this balance between frame and water, solution and particle, is a parallel composition to Tyne Gordon’s painted works. Inversely: Gordon’s paintings are surfaces for swimming in. The register that Gordon works in is of things cast off. branch broken in high wind, accidental beam of light. In a banal photograph that I made as a child, a phantom spray of water vaults through the image, as though a garden sprinkler had gone off just as the shutter clicked. There was no sprinkler though, only an accidental arc of light appearing somewhere between the backyard and the roll of film. It was this imperfect photo that I remembered when I first saw Tyne Gordon’s paintings for Wet Plate. The paintings are scored with the same curving light form, but unlike my image, Gordon’s forms are really derived from the watery trajectory of a garden hose. I can not think about Gordon’s work without thinking also of photography, as a practice where light behaves as found object, detritus of other circumstances which have been rendered invisible. Gordon’s too, is an alchemical process of a reaction occurring on a metal plate. Her works are produced through layered application of oils on a sheet of copper or aluminium. In his essay on photography, Walter Benjamin writes of Daguerre’s iodised silver plates, a picture so delicate fixed on them that the beholder was required to tilt the object back and forward to make out its grey contours.1 This is the same motion that took place in the studio, Gordon angling the work to illuminate the thicket of matte and lustre forms. The earliest plates had such low photosensitivity that they needed to be exposed to the open air for lengthy periods of time.2 To make an image, environment and chemical must coalesce and crystallise. “Everything on earth is food: earth, water, fire, air, plant, animal, light,” writes Ross Simonini in his essay “Warm Home Energy.”3 When Gordon texts me recipes for the resin frames that shelter the metal panes, I recall a favourite game of assembling imaginary meals from the wastes of the playing field. It was always a negotiation of magic, beauty, material and illusion; the dish should look like a perfect cookie, even, or especially, if it was made of gladwrap and hair bobble fossilised in a gravelly mound. The interplay between industrial material and organic matter is a recurring idea for Gordon. Lichen, silver leaf, tarseal and resin comprise the frame of Scanner, a mixture poured into a silicon mould, and turned out when set. In another, strands of iridescent tinsel are suspended in a cloudy swamp. There is a visual rhyme here, with the texture of grass trampled into mud, the blades pushing up through the sludge. The fibrous grass mixed with the smooth texture of wet soil resembles fibreglass, and so Gordon’s frame becomes both of these too. I play with the words, substituting glass with grass. Fibregrass, a slick of sod masquerading as synthetic textile. A sheet of pewter-cast bark chips are strung in the gallery space, Spray. There is a difference in the composition of old and new pewter. The newer kind is an alloy of tin, copper and antimony, a metallic concoction that has replaced the old composite of tin and lead. There is something darker and duller about pewter than other metals. Maybe it is that its pocked texture holds onto nocturne shadows better, but it might also be a characteristic of the metals that it is comprised of. Pewter has a low melting point, around 250 degrees celsius, the temperature that Gordon must reach to turn a collection of abandoned commemorative tumblers into a liquid from which to forge. Not without peril, transforming the pewter exudes poisonous fumes. Of lead, so of poison, an equilibrium danger between toxin and natural, above a nighttime potion. When Spray wavers, the light snags like running water river bed, so I guess they are earth and water at once. The sound of them caught by wind might chime, bell-like magical or sacred Or like the rounded sound of water falling from sky and dam. By passing from the entrance of the gallery to the rear spaces, we are the shower passing through. We did experience several days of heavy rain at the beginning of February, strange for the time of year. The ground had already been baked hard by the lack of rainfall prior, the rocks smooth and dusty and crusted together by clay soil. With the deluge, ribbons of water excavate the ground, turning the clay into a thick umber slurry. I imagine, over eons, the rivulets eroding the rock deep enough to exhume an abandoned swimming pool, the tilework from the pool crusting with minerals and moss onto lilos and buoys deflated by time and swollen in the substrate and lichen. These are Gordon’s inflatable forms, ground as painterly grout for strange tiles and worked slumps of dark green. To uncover these objects is to find relics of a ritual forgotten and unknown. The currency of Gordon’s work is the mystical and ritual, as though we turned up when the party was over, left to sift through its accessories. In a poem in The Goose Bath, Janet Frame writes: “I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold / I am toppled by the world / a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into rocks.”4 There is an ecstasy to things that go up, in the mantra of their repetition. Gordon’s sculptures follow similar logics, a miracle embedded between all these found things that fit together anyway. Moth and Monotreme are assemblages of abstruse objects that are illegible on their own. As compositions though: cake of garden reel and Christmas tree, concentric towers where meaning is generated through combining and believing. This is an inventory of the world and Wet Plate is wading through its architecture, pulling a glittering horizon of parts toward us. “What is aura, in fact? A gossamer fabric woven of space and time: a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close at hand...until the moment or the hour shares in the manifestation— that is called breathing in the aura... well, ‘bringing things closer.’”5 Jane Wallace 1 Walter Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography,” in One-way Street and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2008). 2 Ibid. 3 Ross Simonini, “Warm Home Energy,” in Susan Cianciolo: This Cookbook is Made for the 5th Dimension, edited by Libby Werbel (Portland, Oregon: The Lumber Room, 2021). 4 Janet Frame, “I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold,” The Goose Bath, edited by Bill Manhire, Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold (Auckland: Vintage, 2006). 5 Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646434670744-JYD9YLNYLNVYDTRUZVE3/12+Lilo+1.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/fdea13c5-5e75-434e-a13a-b5adbe0a1eec/4+Scanner_e.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Scanner, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast resin mixed media. 280 x 225mm. Wet Plate, 2022. Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. ELIXIR LAKE, Recently, I have been swimming laps again. At the bottom of the pool swills a layer of sediment from the poolside peripheral, leaves and dirt cast in by overhanging trees, debris of plastic, latex and cotton, filaments shedded from nylon swimming togs, an occasional flake of silver or bead lost to the rhythmic suctioning of the filter. I am another substance in this soup, an amalgamation of strands of hair, skin cells, saliva, chlorine, sunscreen. The poolscape is contained by a border of blue concrete aggregate, a modest imitation of the colour of the ocean. From bird’s eye, this balance between frame and water, solution and particle, is a parallel composition to Tyne Gordon’s painted works. Inversely: Gordon’s paintings are surfaces for swimming in. The register that Gordon works in is of things cast off. branch broken in high wind, accidental beam of light. In a banal photograph that I made as a child, a phantom spray of water vaults through the image, as though a garden sprinkler had gone off just as the shutter clicked. There was no sprinkler though, only an accidental arc of light appearing somewhere between the backyard and the roll of film. It was this imperfect photo that I remembered when I first saw Tyne Gordon’s paintings for Wet Plate. The paintings are scored with the same curving light form, but unlike my image, Gordon’s forms are really derived from the watery trajectory of a garden hose. I can not think about Gordon’s work without thinking also of photography, as a practice where light behaves as found object, detritus of other circumstances which have been rendered invisible. Gordon’s too, is an alchemical process of a reaction occurring on a metal plate. Her works are produced through layered application of oils on a sheet of copper or aluminium. In his essay on photography, Walter Benjamin writes of Daguerre’s iodised silver plates, a picture so delicate fixed on them that the beholder was required to tilt the object back and forward to make out its grey contours.1 This is the same motion that took place in the studio, Gordon angling the work to illuminate the thicket of matte and lustre forms. The earliest plates had such low photosensitivity that they needed to be exposed to the open air for lengthy periods of time.2 To make an image, environment and chemical must coalesce and crystallise. “Everything on earth is food: earth, water, fire, air, plant, animal, light,” writes Ross Simonini in his essay “Warm Home Energy.”3 When Gordon texts me recipes for the resin frames that shelter the metal panes, I recall a favourite game of assembling imaginary meals from the wastes of the playing field. It was always a negotiation of magic, beauty, material and illusion; the dish should look like a perfect cookie, even, or especially, if it was made of gladwrap and hair bobble fossilised in a gravelly mound. The interplay between industrial material and organic matter is a recurring idea for Gordon. Lichen, silver leaf, tarseal and resin comprise the frame of Scanner, a mixture poured into a silicon mould, and turned out when set. In another, strands of iridescent tinsel are suspended in a cloudy swamp. There is a visual rhyme here, with the texture of grass trampled into mud, the blades pushing up through the sludge. The fibrous grass mixed with the smooth texture of wet soil resembles fibreglass, and so Gordon’s frame becomes both of these too. I play with the words, substituting glass with grass. Fibregrass, a slick of sod masquerading as synthetic textile. A sheet of pewter-cast bark chips are strung in the gallery space, Spray. There is a difference in the composition of old and new pewter. The newer kind is an alloy of tin, copper and antimony, a metallic concoction that has replaced the old composite of tin and lead. There is something darker and duller about pewter than other metals. Maybe it is that its pocked texture holds onto nocturne shadows better, but it might also be a characteristic of the metals that it is comprised of. Pewter has a low melting point, around 250 degrees celsius, the temperature that Gordon must reach to turn a collection of abandoned commemorative tumblers into a liquid from which to forge. Not without peril, transforming the pewter exudes poisonous fumes. Of lead, so of poison, an equilibrium danger between toxin and natural, above a nighttime potion. When Spray wavers, the light snags like running water river bed, so I guess they are earth and water at once. The sound of them caught by wind might chime, bell-like magical or sacred Or like the rounded sound of water falling from sky and dam. By passing from the entrance of the gallery to the rear spaces, we are the shower passing through. We did experience several days of heavy rain at the beginning of February, strange for the time of year. The ground had already been baked hard by the lack of rainfall prior, the rocks smooth and dusty and crusted together by clay soil. With the deluge, ribbons of water excavate the ground, turning the clay into a thick umber slurry. I imagine, over eons, the rivulets eroding the rock deep enough to exhume an abandoned swimming pool, the tilework from the pool crusting with minerals and moss onto lilos and buoys deflated by time and swollen in the substrate and lichen. These are Gordon’s inflatable forms, ground as painterly grout for strange tiles and worked slumps of dark green. To uncover these objects is to find relics of a ritual forgotten and unknown. The currency of Gordon’s work is the mystical and ritual, as though we turned up when the party was over, left to sift through its accessories. In a poem in The Goose Bath, Janet Frame writes: “I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold / I am toppled by the world / a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into rocks.”4 There is an ecstasy to things that go up, in the mantra of their repetition. Gordon’s sculptures follow similar logics, a miracle embedded between all these found things that fit together anyway. Moth and Monotreme are assemblages of abstruse objects that are illegible on their own. As compositions though: cake of garden reel and Christmas tree, concentric towers where meaning is generated through combining and believing. This is an inventory of the world and Wet Plate is wading through its architecture, pulling a glittering horizon of parts toward us. “What is aura, in fact? A gossamer fabric woven of space and time: a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close at hand...until the moment or the hour shares in the manifestation— that is called breathing in the aura... well, ‘bringing things closer.’”5 Jane Wallace 1 Walter Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography,” in One-way Street and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2008). 2 Ibid. 3 Ross Simonini, “Warm Home Energy,” in Susan Cianciolo: This Cookbook is Made for the 5th Dimension, edited by Libby Werbel (Portland, Oregon: The Lumber Room, 2021). 4 Janet Frame, “I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold,” The Goose Bath, edited by Bill Manhire, Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold (Auckland: Vintage, 2006). 5 Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/df07fcb1-4de8-4256-a3bb-4bf91d22a165/9+Socket_e.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Socket, 2022. Oil on aluminium, cast resin mixed media. 210 x 165mm. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1646434918580-0E1DZQ6HNGJIQUYL3BO2/installation4.jpg lilo- watery grave - socket - scanner - Make it stand out Lilo, 2022. Found material, tiles, grout, plaster. 1500 x 600mm x 100mm. Watery Grave, 2022. Oil on aluminium and cast pewter frame. 1260 x 1260mm. http://tynegordon.com/portfolio daily 0.75 2025-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472079661297-FZZL1AC1VA6BC2UDJUML/DSCN9820+%281%29.jpg work Cotton Mouth, oil and acrylic on board, 297 x 420mm, 2016 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472079981383-QF8Y6N4OOIYRN8QALDL6/edited3.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080338632-F9JDDP5EM3ZPKTFPMY65/DSC_0609.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472183274541-BVY09JAQF4DUCHF6KC71/DSCN9892.JPG work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472079998742-5U9Q0QIMF2TSVUFMQ3PK/DSCN9763.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472182697943-03SGLNT06FY8JONGIQAA/DSCN9979.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080362069-3EHJU8V974R1SF2AGLVF/DSCN9673.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080384373-U855UV84U2YZF5183NAS/object16.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080516062-T8TNOM0UTYU8ODGHHKXT/DSCN9643.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472183470370-3S5BH394YRV597C4OQ8R/DSCN9844.JPG work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472183705056-1H9GTH6RAU9AYNSLJZGU/tyne_17.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080429383-NATNSA3FQ4R8KRTYSCGT/DSCN9636.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080451474-9DHK056DOBXJX4N0LZ5X/object9.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080660264-CN7MNI4418R5VZRKNUCI/boomer4.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472080669858-RTFVCDRGE1W9NA8ZGZIE/DSCN9668.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472182998530-L93SU8ZNH8DCMSZL0FJR/DSCN9464.jpg work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472183134337-QIWVJNCHG9F1TXVU5XN0/DSCN9854.JPG work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1472183653294-DMHR50TVKFAWTGPR20QP/tyne_18.jpg work http://tynegordon.com/silo-2 daily 0.75 2025-12-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/34a9a120-6762-4169-b28e-1a370db9f552/coversilo.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/2ea0377a-0a6e-4620-8cb3-124f9a03c5b1/Scan+2.jpeg SILO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/ce1f1a79-d72d-4c3f-baa2-ec589399a94f/Scan+4.jpeg SILO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/88057548-3b7b-4b1f-9e0f-b2be0b67afec/Scan+5.jpeg SILO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/1312b6b0-a3ad-45fd-93ec-1f4a1918c75f/Scan+8.jpeg SILO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/25c17292-0810-4527-bfa6-6a5d17a4d082/Scan+9.jpeg SILO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552c41bee4b099037ab66ea9/47563c03-60cd-4d03-b61e-b3323533ece6/Scan+11.jpeg SILO Excerpts of SILO book, designed by Lee Richardson, words by Jane Wallace, 2023, contact Jonathan Smart Gallery for a copy