Paint shadows the brush in a soft trace of thought, reflex and sentiment. There is a notion that painting exists as a continually active present, an imprecise moment held by the artist’s mark, inevitably past and yet somehow present. What is left behind in Judith Wright’s work is more than the passage of trailing paint. Her painted conversations leave a whisper hanging in the air.
‘Judith Wright: Conversations’, a survey exhibition curated by Rhana Devenport, Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, includes work from 1987 to the present and shows Wright’s varied output of videos, artist’s books, paintings and installations.
Wright’s work creates conversations between the various mediums she uses in her art and between her life and her art. Echo of Memory Trod [Two Hands] (1996), an installation of shoe lasts for example, is a reflection both of her years as a dancer and of the shoe factory owned by her former husband. The videos are made with friends and family, her son taking a prime role in such works as One Dances. Wright’s time in India for the 1997 ‘Fire and Life’ project is represented in the exhibition by the video Veil (1997). In this work the artist covered the camera with a veil to film in the streets, using video for information gathering to discover an ideal note-taking medium, the equivalent of the sketch book. While maintaining her practice as a video artist, Wright was quick to realise video was the best way to capture and hold movement for transformation into paintings. Many of the paintings made since then have started with impressions derived from video.
This approach has an inbuilt imprecision: it is