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