Notes On: Works on Paper

Connie Brown on Kristy Gorman’s exhibition Muffled Green, Anna Miles Gallery, 23 July – 18 August 2022.

Posterity seems unlikely and therefore miraculous for any image made upon paper, when, as a surface, it is so prone to damage, to ripping, denting, fading, foxing, fire. This is probably why paper is the medium of choice for letters or sketches more often than it is painterly gestures that address themselves to time. Paper is best for things fine to be disposed of once their job is done. If they’ve done it so well as to earn our keeping, we do so against their will.

William Henry Fox Talbot fought a battle of wills with paper when developing his early photogenic technologies. Any image he succeeded in capturing with his saline solutions and the sunlight was captured only temporarily, unless stored permanently in the dark from then on. The works shown in Muffled Green by Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Kristy Gorman recall Fox Talbot’s early light drawings, and share with them a sense of imminent loss. Their gauzy, barely-there ink washes look like they might disappear while your back is turned, so you better look carefully now while you still have the chance at how they pick up the grain of the paper like dust does light, revealing and revelling in the fine degrees to which its fibres have been macerated, compressed, bonded into a surface for her to work. Only sometimes does it cooperate, but the colours’ knack for bleeding into one another, thirstily absorbed by the pores of the paper like tides into the sand, becomes part of the composition, creating shapes with some edges that appear torn while others are braced with angles so precise that they could have been incised into the surface with a knife tip.

With Muffled Green, Gorman leans in to the materiality of paper as a medium uniquely poised to capture things and feelings that, like itself, threaten to pass more quickly than they can be seized, or melt from your hand as it closes around them, or recede just a little more from the work’s surface with the beginning of each new day.

Kristy Gorman, Slub, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm

Kristy Gorman, Muffled Green. Installation view, Anna Miles Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau, July 2022

Kristy Gorman, Serge, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm

Kristy Gorman, Scrim, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm (framed dimensions 53 x 43.5 cm)

Kristy Gorman, Canopy, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm (framed dimensions 53 x 43.5 cm)

Kristy Gorman, Pique, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm (framed dimensions 53 x 43.5 cm)

Kristy Gorman, Burr, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm

Kristy Gorman, Baize, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm (framed dimensions 53 x 43.5 cm)

Kristy Gorman, Burr, 2022, ink on paper, 37 x 28 cm (framed dimensions 53 x 43.5 cm)

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