Lauren Lysaght at Whitespace

Lauren Lysaght enjoys using materials that are seen as trivial or non-precious. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Lauren Lysaght likes using "low-rent" materials. Her recent installation at the Corban Arts Centre in Henderson, Transit Lounge, was made from the cheap plastic weave bags people buy at $2 shops. Her latest show at Whitespace, Bring Me the Head of Diablo Lucro, features polystyrene heads and swords covered in garish sequins.

"I enjoy using materials which are not valued, which are seen as trivial or non-precious. For me they are very precious, I get great joy in discovering something like that," says Lysaght.

Her eyes were opened to the power of sequins during a spell in the north of England in the mid-90s, where she saw the way Romany women would put sequins on fruit which they would display prominently in windows.

"It was done as a sort of status thing. It is always humbling to see beauty in non-precious things," she says.

Lysaght came late to art, making a decision in the mid-80s to quit working for community mental health organisation Richmond Fellowship to concentrate on her work. "I said I would give myself two years."

Her initial efforts were notable enough to secure her a solo show at Lower Hutt's Dowse Art Museum in 1987, and she has worked steadily since.

"My art started with what I could make at the kitchen table at night when the children were in bed, and a lot of my work now is an extension of the kitchen table," she says.

"Every time I show art, anything but the making is a by-product. The making is an obsession for me, it is incidental it comes into a gallery."

The Whitespace show draws inspiration from Sam Peckinpah's 1974 nihilist statement Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, which features Warren Oates as the loser piano player Bennie trying to collect a bounty from a Mexican drug lord.

"The work was done while I was under pressure with strange medical assessments which were totally dehumanising and demoralising," says Lysaght, who has long-term back and leg problems.

"When I came home I would sit in my studio and start pinning all these heads. I was thinking of the movie and how the piano player forms a relationship with the head in the bag sitting on the car seat beside him, and thinking there is a phoniness about those medical assessments where the people working for that corporation try to befriend you; sort of this pseudo friendship, and I think they are trying to bag heads, that is, get you off the books.

"So there are those parallels, and I just wanted to make some exquisitely jewelled heads."

The disembodied head has a long provenance in art and film - think Magritte's The Lovers, or Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Jewels real or fake, and their relationship to status, fascinate Lysaght, whose life and work have involve people who have little.

"I am attracted to this way of working because of the class issue. I do have a chip on my shoulder regarding the arts, I believe they have been taken over by the middle classes.

"I am a butcher's daughter from Tauranga and proud of it," she says.

"I get concerned the visual arts try to be nice. I don't do nice."

She rates as one of her high points her 2003 residency at Unitec, where she was able to create a show drawing on her experiences on the site when she was committed to Oakley Hospital at age 15 for being "not properly controlled".

"I'm still not under proper control. People forget that was a different time then; you didn't question authority.

"That residency was a strange experience. It was like game, set and match to me. Revenge was sweet."

Lysaght wants to get back to work at her Helensville studio. "I want to get so much art done over the next 20 years. So much art, so little time."

Exhibition

*What: Bring Me the Head of Diablo Lucro by Lauren Lysaght
*Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Grey Lynn, to Sep 8