CHARLOTTE HANDY

As a child growing up in Taranaki I knew two mountains, both ubiquitous: the real volcano that established one’s physical bearings; and in my parents living room, Charles Heaphy’s painting- an impossibly symmetrical cone, idealized and perfected - that established other kinds of bearings…away from childhood, both remain with me as memories -equally real

excerpt from artist’s statement from “OVERLAND’ exhibition

In contrast to the wild and ungovernable “natural” landscapes I have also been interested in the conceit of “the garden” . Several exhibitions have had a garden theme, most recently “Girl and the garden “ 2015.

“Handy presents the garden as a forest and with this metaphor central to the broad dialogues contained, commences her now characteristic exploration of the spaces between the abstract and the literal. She uses light, atmosphere, line, substance, shape and the hue of colour to express moments by holding them in suspension. Each work is comprised of fractured elements and floating tablets of colour – a consequential softness is established and conventional perspective is either dissolved or rendered ambiguously’.

excerpt from exhibition catalogue 2016 Stephen HIgginson, Milford gallery

I think a painting succeeds when it repeatedly engages the viewer, giving up some of its secrets but retaining a sense of enduring mystery. In the portraiture element of my practice I create subjects from memory and imagination, who look out from the frame and ask questions of the viewer . My daughter was an initial muse and her teenage ambivalence imbued some of the portraits with a reluctance to be consumed and they stare back offering an array of emotional states.

commissions undertaken on request

THE SEA INSIDE (exhibition review)

by David Eggleton

The Listener Magazine

Low cloud came in over the lake in the morning," writes Kirsty Gunn in her novel Rain, "[and] swimming out into it you could feel how, with each stroke, you were further and further out into the whiteness." You get a similar sensation looking at some of the paintings in Charlotte Handy's exhibition The Inland Sea at Milford Galleries, Dunedin. Her works map dreamscapes; they are the paintings of a self-exiled New Zealander whose eyes comb a phantasmal body of water for evidence of something specific, something familiar.

Handy paints uncertainty by choosing to depict wavering mirage-like forms that fade in and out of cloud build-up that has settled over gently lapping waves. Some of her watery scenes have the enervated stillness of a becalmed lake - above which smeared cross-shapes seem to flit - while others depict an oily ocean swell, shrouded in turn by fog banks that ships' masts pierce. These masts, with their spars, may accumulate until they resemble crosses in a cemetery, or perhaps ships' flags: barely there, playing hide and seek in the fog.

In Radio Silence (2006), an obscuring wraith-like mist offers the sense of something substantial moving on the face of the waters, but what? Maybe a whole navy ghosting out there - or is it just one nuclear submarine slowly and silently surfacing? "The eye scans risky horizons of its own," wrote Allen Curnow in "Landfall in Unknown Seas": "Always to islanders danger/Is what comes over the sea."

Handy grew up in Taranaki and since the mid-90s has lived mostly overseas - in Britain, Japan and now Turkey - with her partner, who works for the diplomatic service. What her paintings convey is a sense of dislocation and displacement. Her views are non-specific, although a title such as The Straits points to the Mediterranean and the Bosphorus, which the city of Istanbul overlooks. (Indeed, there are two "inland seas" above Turkey: the Black and the Caspian.)

Built up in oil on canvas out of a kind of handwriting of dabs and dashes of chalky blues and greys with the occasional admixture of ochre, these are paintings that have been slapped down with the urgency of diary entries. 

Yet, as you gaze a little longer at these puzzle pictures with their messages of melancholy, drift and distance, and clock the vague but recognisable allusions to such works as Colin McCahon's Jet out from Muriwai (1973) - the one in which a cross smeared in the sky stands in for a passenger jet trailing vapour - or Milan Mrkusich's Dividing of the Waters (1963), you also notice how those indeterminate horizons and sloppy waves represent acts of suppression. The sea doesn't give up its secrets easily. That might be the Bosphorus or the Taranaki Bight; at any rate, its very indeterminacy suggests it is a remembered view, one that blends painting histories, from Piet Mondrian to Luc Tuymans.

Handy has conflated her uncertainties as an expatriate with her uncertainties about painting as a medium. After the advent of digital imagery, whither painting? This is the question The Inland Sea circles. A painting graduate from Elam Art School in the early 90s, Handy crossed over to photography - exhibiting at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Hayward Gallery in London in the mid-90s - before working her way back into oils as if probing for the seam of an all-but-exhausted mine.

With its fragmentary representation, its repressed auras, this is painting about the end of painting as heroic rhetoric. No more transcendental pillars of prophetic cloud; instead, a kind of shipping-container congestion of sea lanes and fog lifting to disclose glimpses of teary skies stacked with panes - the endless blue windows of computer screens, perhaps - before the fog drops again.

in my painting practice I like to revisit certain themes. The use of a bird as a motif is a new direction I’m excited about exploring . Birds have a powerful symbolic and aesthetic charge and in earliest history were seen as messengers of the gods and in some cultures transgressed the liminal boundaries between the earthly and the metaphysical .

Charlotte worked as a professional photographer in the 1990s. Her work has graced the covers of several books, been featured in magazines and annual reports and she has exhibited in group exhibitions at notable galleries in New Zealand. Charlotte was a finalist in several international competitions and has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and also at the Hayward centre, (London) .

she will exhibit at Bond street gallery in march 2019