BLUE FLEUR: Airy and Articulate

Natalie Guy & Sandra Bushby

Opening: 5pm, Wednesday 24 April

Bushby and Guy come together as two women artists with an admiration of each other’s work. Their interest in a joint project was spurred by a discussion of the sense of atmosphere they recognised in each other’s works and the realisation that they both draw upon literary sources for inspiration.

In Blue Fleur: Airy and Articulate, a second iteration exhibition which derives its title from the poem by Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003), Sandra Bushby and Natalie Guy respond to poetic language across boundaries of medium, opening the edges between the materiality of language, emergent painting processes, and stained glass as a vessel for sculptural translation.

Joanna Margaret Paul’s poetry collection Like Love Poems was chosen for its expressive symbolism of space and colour. The artists feel these qualities are physically manifested in Paul’s painted series Stations of the Cross (c. 1971), for St Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Port Chalmers. They recognise that Paul crosses boundaries in her use of materiality, as the fresco surface is juxtaposed with the translucency of the stained-glass windows in the chapel. Her dense, matte paintings which are spare in colour operate as a kind of window with its own sense of transparency, eliciting spiritual contemplation within the religious setting.

Exhibition runs until Friday 17 May.

About the Artists

Sandra Bushby completed a Doctorate of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland (2022) and a MFA (2011) from Elam School of Fine Arts. She is represented by Sumer Gallery. Selected shows include; Sea Garden 2022 Sumer Gallery, Edges and openings 2020 Sumer Gallery, Species of Spaces 2019 George Fraser Gallery, Turning Tides 2018 Elam Project Space, It All Depends Upon 2016 Two Rooms Gallery and A space to live in 2014 Window Gallery. Her work is held in both Te Papa and Auckland Museum collections.

Natalie Guy (Ngāpuhi, Ngāruahine, Pakehā) lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She holds a Doctorate (2022) and an MFA (2013) from Elam School of Fine Arts, the University of Auckland. Selected exhibitions include City of Tomorrow, 2022, Tauranga Art Gallery, The Window, 2019, Te Tuhi, Auckland, Scape season 2019, Christchurch, and Sculpture on the Gulf, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2024, Waiheke Island.

Guy won the Woollahra Small Sculpture Award in 2014. She was the recipient of the inaugural Asia NZ Foundation Residency Award to Varanasi India, 2017, and was a selected resident at Sculpture Space, Utica, NYS, 2019. Her 2021 work The Pool is a permanent public work in Christchurch.

Image: Blue Fleur: Airy and Articulate

The Ilam Campus Gallery is generously supported by Three Boys Brewery, Mt Beautiful Wines, Murray and Co, and the University of Canterbury.