Josephine Do's delicate fusion of cultural layers

By T.J. McNAMARA

Josephine Do is having her second exhibition at the Lane Gallery and her work intensifies her previous images that hover somewhere between printmaking, photography and painting. Each is unique and incorporates some photographic images.

These highly accomplished works have a reference to China or the Chinese, using Chinese paper which is shot through with threads of grass or silk.

On this the artist places layers of colour and image, fusing them into unity. The images are about pressures - of the past, of tradition, of politics. The images dissolve softly into each other, sometimes fudging the issues. A tighter individual rhythm to each print would clarify matters.

In one print a dancer emerges in three stages. In another, women do drill with guns. In a third, Heroes, there is another dancer with a gun and Mao presides over the entire work.

The best of these is Yellow Plastic Chair in which the images lock together to make a moving whole. It is a penetrating yet delicate work.

The exhibition is shared with Alexis Neal, whose prints are clean, bold and resonant. She prints the shapes of Maori patu and fish-hooks and places atmospheric, evocative forms which link the human artefact with the land or the sea or activities where humans interact with both.

The elegant restraint of these prints is pushed to an extreme in a blind embossed print that demands intense scrutiny but does not really reward it.

The Judith Anderson Gallery has another double exhibition, featuring paintings by Sally Burton. Her work combines landscape and open vessels that link with the female presence and the land. She makes unique use of the qualities of the tapa cloth on which she paints, differentiating between the stronger Fijian tapa and the less robust Samoan tapa.

The Fijian tapa, dark brown in The Lie of the Land, is strong and allows her to lay out her spacious harbour views which lead through headlands to an expansive sea and a light beyond the horizon.

Around these moody images she weaves details that include portals like temple doorways. The whole is given richness by the use of metallic paint which is given subtlety by the texture of the cloth.

The Samoan cloth is divided into sections and Burton uses the divisions between the parts of the cloth to work subtle evolutionary changes between the ceramic shapes and the land, notably in the works called Trembler and in the throbbing, opening and closing of Pacific Tides. The best have a genuine sacramental quality.

The exhibition is shared with Christine Boswijk, whose ceramics combine natural forms and materials and an interactive sense of their making with brittle and irregular personality. Up the terrazzo stairs in an old bank building in Karangahape Rd is the Ivan Anthony Gallery which is showing the intensely autobiographical work of former surfer Roger Mortimer.

One of the works is a long narrative sequence in scenes, like the Bayeux Tapestry but instead of being woven it is engraved into the fibreglass of a surfboard.

This been seized on and taken across the road as an important part in an exhibition at Artspace but there is still plenty of Mortimer's quirky, weird work to be seen, including his children depicted as early Italian angels and his correspondence with various government departments rendered as medieval documents.

Whales are found all through the show: sperm whales, right whales and whales being harpooned against a background of official documents whose letters turn to blood when they cross the sea beasts. Narrative art is unfashionable these days but when it is inscribed on artificial whale teeth it compels attention.