Bio

Rachel Hope Peary is a Kirikiriroa Hamilton-based artist whose work is held in the collections of the Waikato Museum, the Waikato Institute of Technology and the Suter Gallery, Whakatū Nelson. Fundamental to her practice as an artist is the interrogation of abstract painting in its traditional forms, frequently resulting in porous grid structures that reveal the very substrate of canvas and pigment. Curator and writer Ed Hanfling recently observed, ‘the artworks of Rachel Hope Peary are still paintings, no matter how far they stretch the fabric of the medium. They could be paintings about paintings, or even deconstructions of the discipline, because they play, quite seriously, with the materials and qualities that paintings conventionally have.’

This Colour Is Connected to That Colour 01 (2021) in Te Haerenga Collection is a work that possesses this ‘see-through’ quality – dissolving the picture plane, and in its gauze-like woven construction facilitating a dialogue with the ‘objecthood’ of the artwork and the space it holds and displaces. In its taut grid it also throws ley lines to foundational figures of modernism, including Nasreen Mohamedi, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella and Aotearoa artist Geoff Thornley, all artists concerned with activating surface tension and letting the grid, the squares, the maths ‘rock’. Hanfling also reads a post-object kinship with anthropological thinking: ‘There is an ever-increasing body of “posthumanist” or “new-materialist” theory that grapples with the agency of seemingly inanimate things.’ Such interpretations bring to the centre the overall package of a painting; in this case, the frame and stretcher bar become more than support, but actors and a subject of the work. The entire whole, including the ‘dead’ space ‘behind’ the canvas thread, also contributes to the animism of this subtle woven work.

To those painters mentioned above, we can also add an entire cohort of weavers across cultures whose works have informed contemporary art that refers to craft – material, thread, raranga (weaving), pattern making and their associated labours – as a locus of productive conceptual thinking. Te Haerenga Collection artists Emma Fitts and Tia Ansell also evince kinship within this kaupapa.

Exhibitions

• 2023   Laree Payne Gallery, Kirikiriroa Hamilton: Kneel and kiss the ground
• 2021   Aotearoa Art Fair, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Laree Payne Gallery
• 2021   Laree Payne Gallery, Kirikiriroa Hamilton: My Mother’s Hands
• 2018   Playstation Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington: How to Say Something with Fewer Words