Lucy Skaer, In the Shelterbelt, Arrows Rain Down, The Day is Bright and Open, Hare Darts for Cover and the Chord of C Minor Sounds, 2021

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Lucy Skaer, In the Shelterbelt, Arrows Rain Down, The Day is Bright and Open, Hare Darts for Cover and the Chord of C Minor Sounds, 2021.
Oak (ebonised), resin, aluminium, macrocarpa, and bioplastic, dimensions vary.

This work is an act of translation. The original text is Livre de Chasse, by Gaston Phebus, a 14th-century illuminated manuscript which details the process of a renaissance hunt. This has been translated into a series of pictograms but not exactly, it is a different form of legibility in which the materials become elements in the story. The simple sentence expands to signify a day, both bright and open, and contracts into something taut and even dangerous, as our stories have the potential to be. As the artist has written, “The narrative of the hunt, and the empathy felt with the hunted, somehow embodies the violence which I feel is part of abstraction / the making of images and words.”

Originally made by the artist in 2018, in bronze, yew, copper, oil paint and lithographic stone, the sentence has been re-materialised here in Aotearoa, working with local makers and locally available materials. The yew woods are transformed into macrocarpa, the “bright and open day” to translucent resin, the running hare to aluminium.

In the Shelterbelt was exhibited alongside work by Lucy Skaer, Cathy Livermore and Rachel Shearer in Light enough to read by.

With thanks to the local makers of individual elements:

Piano keys made by Tim Boyd (Cross St, Auckland)
Bough made by Louise Palmer (St Albans, Christchurch)
Hare made by Peter Newton (Woollston, Christchurch)
Lozenges made by Steve Yoon (Onehunga, Auckland)
Day made by Simon Dyer (Rāpaki, Christchurch)

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