Avian Loop

Issue 6

Celtic Blessing

When all this happened

You lived at the bottom of the hills the dark clouds

The colour of ash of bruises

Rolled violently over

Propelled by the Southerly wind your eyes

Always reminded me of

One day soon after Christmas you met me at the bottom of the stairs

I’d been jingling down wearing a dress like a candy cane

And a necklace of bells

You dark with hushed tones needed to tell me something

“But not here can we meet later?”

You kept me waiting for two hours in a deserted faculty bar

Trying to figure out what I’d done wrong

Remembering the last time when you

Asked me out for lunch and then

Reduced me to tears at the table

With a recital of my failures

While people around us surreptitiously looked

And looked away

To tell me that I was one of the things that made you feel good

About returning after the break

“You can see why I couldn’t tell you this at the office.”

I couldn’t.

My father was injured falling off a ladder on a building site

Sally was volunteering at the emergency room when we arrived to see him

She told me that when there’s a Nor’wester or a full moon

They’re inundated with accidents and incidents

People who are thrown off course in a hot bluster

Or who lose their way at the mercy of gravitational pull

Your father responded to disaster to a once in a lifetime flood

With aggressive artistic ingenuity

Your desire for lineage for legacy is clear

This shaken ground providing a stage for your contribution

To the dynasty

I don’t know where you live now

Just that it is by the sea and that daily you must face off with the

Frigid mercurial Easterly wind at your front as you

Take this new step

For eight years I have been speechless

Tonight I come to bear witness to stand

As a silent dissenter beneath the glory and

Deceit of your crosswinds

To collate a catalogue of your conquests and your crimes

To quietly declare lies lies lies

As you take everyone’s praise and wipe away false tears

Light enough to read by

Fiona Connor, Lucy Skaer, Rachel Shearer and Cathy Livermore

Curated by Abby Cunnane, Hamish Petersen, and Michelle Wang

The Physics Room

11 June - 25 July, 2021

7.9.21

The Physics Room’s library collection has returned

elemental to Light enough to read by  June 11- 26 July

 an ‘unboxing’ of collected artistic essence

    la bibliothèque de lumière

    an architectural venting of the gallery

    space to capture this light

                                           and a puzzle door

   Light enough wafts into every nook

   at once touchable then fleeting

   even at first glimpse the material works extract  

   a promise to return

   and two weeks later I do return

   a bright July 3 Saturday afternoon

   for a talk by Gwynneth Porter

   In the new library space

   to consider

   concepts from her recent PhD

   “libraries as openings to a multiplicity of subject positions

        delinquent subjectivities on the run

        writing themselves as open structures

 and the institution as a site of minor revolt by adolescents of     any age.”

                                         TPR’s new library is small

                                       a shoe box book sanctuary

                                         for ideas and theories  

                                                 manifest in print

                                         of many kinds – collected

                                            Christchurch is between

                                            lockdowns and distancing

                                            today

                                            people are happily jammed

                                            passing chairs overhead

                                            to squeeze more in

             Gwynn’s words and ideas

             inhaled by a hovering audience

                                                                                    synthesising filing          relating

                while this little library swirls with

                Alumni of the Canterbury Varsity,

                its great library has been brutalised

                its books scattered....by decree.

  ordinary titles appear on tables

                                                                      outside elevators

        in disused tutorial rooms

                                                           on window ledges

                         those of an Ascribed Value gain a place in

                             an announced monthly Book dump

                                    a scramble in the Undercroft

                        on the day of the Art Book Dump

                        Michael and Tilaye rescue

                        three boxes of delicious art books

                        three versions of building plans

                            for the Versailles Palace

                            and

                                                          Vanishing Ireland ...a

                                                              photographic longing

                                          by richard Fitzgerald and edna O’brien

O’brien’s love of Ireland is held close

depictions of a state under siege

        patriarchy religion war

saved for fiction

her words for pictorial Ireland twirl

away from deep deprivation

and as they do

the lending record of Vanishing

provides a home, one of Gwynneth’s

                           “sites of minor revolt by   adolescents of any age”                                         …a student  perfecting taglines

                                sometime between 1988–1994

G n’ R writer where are you now…who couldn’t come?

              Who is C n’ P ?        

Like C n’P my delinquencies are varied

one finds me at Morley College                                                                                                                                                                                                                  edna O’brien is presenting

I am studying syncopation with Andras Ranki

we are chatting with a dissident South American Rockstar about Gramsci

he has left his country to write an opera

about hegemony

as he enjoys his London anonymity

we all dance in the light of Andras Ranki

27. 9. 21    1pm

The Dunedin Guns N’ Roses Tour has just been postponed

Light enough to read by

Fiona Connor, Lucy Skaer, Rachel Shearer and Cathy Livermore

Curated by Abby Cunnane, Hamish Petersen, and Michelle Wang

The Physics Room

11 June - 25 July, 2021

Rust Moon, Apricot Dawn

As encountered, from right to left:

Cut flower (midnight)

Cut flower (cinnamon)

Leaf shape (aqua)

Leaf shape (aqua)

Multi-strand object (caramel)
Cut wallpaper (mustard)

I meet the installation just after the super flower blood moon total lunar eclipse. In this dreamlike season, bounded by winter’s edges, the cut works feel tethered to long, deep nights. I hover above the floor in the exhibition space, drawn by this bright array which sweeps across the long white wall ahead of me. The forms take my dream hand and pass me between them, cut cream, peach corner, floral tumble.

Cut flower (cinnamon)        

Cut wallpaper (teal)

Cut wallpaper (mustard)

Cut wallpaper with raffia (caramel)
Cut pleats (blush)

Cut form (midnight)

Thick like a sage leaf, picked under moonlight. Thick like the air, before a rainstorm. Thick like a spring shadow, on hot concrete. These sensual works appear as a gathering, a maternal coalition of forms, linked, intersected, intervalled. As I meet each one, I recall the many mothers of our childhood: the mother, pale and disciplined as a winter’s morning; the mother, with laughter as broad as her stove pots; the mother, setting out mattresses with her duvet gentleness; the mother, cucumber-scented hands bearing us to bed. The works channel and hold a similar familial presence, their paper forms bearing up the weight of the gallery wall.

Floral shape (aqua)

Floral shape (black)

Cut wallpaper (blush)
Cut wallpaper with raffia (mustard)

Cut wallpaper (caramel)

Cut flower (midnight)

On the far left of the installation, one work seems to act as a gathering of breath, or a punctuation. Vertical bolts of verdant energy traverse its vertical form, each line flanked by crisp cream channels. This piece is pricked across its surface, curved tendrils surging outwards. Set formations suggest a posture, a readiness. Hypnotic rows of midnight tips give fleeting shape to mysterious presence. I become attuned to the ways in which the work curls towards me and flattens away from me. Vibrating on the edge of my senses, it communes with its many paper tongues, calling me forward, moving me into stillness.

Cut leaf (midnight)

Cut leaf (midnight)

Cut wallpaper with raffia (aqua)

Cut wallpaper (lilac)

Leaf shape (aqua)

Leaf shape (aqua)

On a lockdown day amidst low light and fresh wind, the works appear again in my mind. They take on a singular aspect, translucent yet temporal; each fold and cut a precious singularity marking a moment in time. They seem to tell me to slow down and absorb the freshness of sponge streaks across the kitchen bench, the illumination of an apricot dawn around the curtain edges. They are like timekeeping devices in which you feel each incision pass like a grain of sand through the narrowed glass channel of the present.

Leaf shape (aqua)
Leaf shape (aqua)

Cut wallpaper with raffia (mustard)

Cut wallpaper (lilac, tangerine)

Multi-strand object (caramel)

Cut flower (midnight)
Cut wallpaper (olive)

Back in the quiet gallery space, I find myself alone with the work, its fullness evading me. The installation is now roped off, and a new distance exists between the work, and the receiving of the work. With this boundary in place, there is a need to reach more intently (but not too closely), lean into the intensity and care in the work, notice each part resonating with its counterparts,
the forming and reforming of materials, the delicate suspension of pinned corners, the gentle cadence of an internal language, each cut a tender record of its coming into being,

as we are.

Lonnie Hutchinson

Fresh Cut

2021

Wallpaper, bitumen paper, raffia, pins

Ahu Tīmataka / Trace Elements

Curated by Nathan Pōhio

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

June 19 - October 31, 2021

+++++

Mind scattered,

        listening to ocean waves

        relying on my lavender aromatherapy and shakti matt

                wondering who I’ve become

        unable to focus on my book before bed

                obviously not myself

the tinnitus is back

        determined not to let it stress me out

        running through the other senses,

        I will feel cosy

We’re going live,

        we start on the floor

        it’s grounding

        I said this was for the group,

        but I needed this

        breathing in

tuning in to Nicholas’ soundscape

        waves turns to rain turns to sculptural pings

The words reverb through,

        I can just make them out

        they’re fuzzy

        like that feeling in your hands after mowing the lawns

        they’re carried

        floating through the wind, rain, fire

I’m on the floor again,

        tired, relaxed

        it’s holding me

        it’s shiny, mostly smooth

        the nail holes are tacky though,

        black putty pushing up

        adding texture

Rachel’s voices are gentle,

the sounds earthy

        I want to slide into it

        roll and move through it

be absorbed

In the gallery I’m used to looking,

        pulling my gaze from inward to out

        objecty objects

        Connor’s floating

        Lucy’s run

        the draft pours over the Italian granite from the window,

        cooling my frame

        yet

        it’s not cool to the touch

A voice returns,

        a knock

        no

        a breath

        an exhale

        two sharp exhales         

I biked in the rain this morning,

        and the rabbit leads the way

        it’s not in front

        it drives the narrative

The keys remind me of Ada’s,

        bargaining for her lifeline

        yet

         on the day of the storm

        she’s left dismembered

        her body is a dense, black garment.

and her grief

        washing into the mud

I can hear the saliva as it cracks,

        only briefly

        washed away by the rain

        I am cool

There were voices behind the rain,

        I decide I can see their faces

dripping

misted

things quieten

faces fading into the depths        

Light enough to read by

Fiona Connor, Lucy Skaer, Rachel Shearer and Cathy Livermore

Curated by Abby Cunnane, Hamish Petersen, and Michelle Wang

The Physics Room

11 June - 25 July, 2021

Avian Loop , Issue 5

Published in December of 2021

Ōtautahi, Aotearoa

ISSN 2744-4740

©Avian Loop 2021        

Avian Loop is produced by the monthly art writing group first established by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space in 2018.

Writers and editors for issue 5 include but are not limited to:

Natalie Kittow

Keren Oertly

georgy tarren sweeney

Designer:

Daniel Shaskey

Typefaces:

Avara is a collaborative font initiated by Raphaël Bastide and published by VelvetyneType Foundry. MT Grotesque is designed by Frank Hinman Pierpont.

Printer:

Angus Donaldson

Correspondence:

Avian Loop

PO Box 22 351

Otautahi, 8013