Urgent, precise links to land and life

What can we use instead of that damnable word "interesting" for three fine exhibitions this week? All have recognisable people, animals, houses and scenes in them but art is always so much more than copying appearances; we need adjectives that will convey the special qualities the artist gives to these things.

Perhaps we should adopt those the British painter Lucian Freud is said to have written over his studio door: "Urgent, subtle, precise, robust".

Certainly there is a sense of urgency about two of the shows. Both Viky Garden and Bing Dawe convey the feeling they are anxious and need to give visual expression to their ideas.

Viky Garden's Any Given Day is at the Judith Anderson Gallery until December 6. As usual her work is autobiographical. The figure that appears in all the paintings is a persona of the artist but also works symbolically as a generalised woman figure.

The woman wears the same dress in all the paintings. It has a big check pattern like a tablecloth and on the checks are sprays of cherries which symbolise both fertility and loss of virginity or innocence.

Another consistent feature is that the woman wears pink rubber gloves which suggest housework and gardening. The one painting in the show that does not have a figure in it is a still-life of these gloves.

Symbols are all very well but they must be given an effective visual presence and Garden's figures have an extraordinary force as they act out their part in wide landscape settings. Rural II, the most powerful of all, has a strong base in the skirt and a neck like a column as it looks from the hills of a rural setting towards something like an apartment block on the horizon; torn clouds in the sky set the emotional tone. A broken fence is not only precise in the rural setting but also suggests broken barriers.

As always with this artist there is an element of the bizarre, notably in Go Out and Play where shadows add to the drama. The housewife figure prances in gumboots, kicking a ball with the symbol of a major world issue on it. But immaculate white washing dancing like spirits on a clothesline marks a different, domestic world.

At times the woman is joined with another. Splendidly, The Visitation links the present with the past with representations of Mary, the Mother of God, meeting Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. This acknowledgment of pregnancy is touching and solemn.

Garden has gone through a long evolution. At each stage she has produced work that is curiously compelling and this visual expression of the emotions of mature women is completely convincing.

In Bing Dawe's work there is the urgency of contemplating matters subject to change, as well as the precision that comes from the exact modelling of birds even though the realism is confined to their heads. His show, Wry, at the McPherson Gallery until November 28, is made up of clusters of bird heads.

The heads, moulded in ceramic and naturalistically coloured, are all mounted on steel spikes which make an excellent compositional device as well as suggesting birds as trophies, decoys or even garden ornaments.

These clusters are given a robust visual presence by formal arrangements so an oval arrangement of 25 spoonbills, each with a long spike, is formed in an oval to make an egg shape. Roosters, each with its red crest, make a chattering frieze called Wheat Trail.

Pied, made of 126 pieces, is formed into a tight centre that includes 80 black stilts, almost the entire surviving population, while around it the supplanting pied stilt swings and swoops in a twittering mass. The curved line made by the long spike gives a dancing effect to pairs of birds such as The Royal Spoonbills.

Close study, visual invention and a sense of the threat to wildlife make these wall sculptures an impressive display.

Thirdly, at Artis Gallery in Parnell until December 1, there is a display by Peter Siddell who has changed from his usual medium of oil to pastel without any loss of the special subtleties of light that characterise his work.

As usual he has assembled details of colonial houses and combined them with the landscape of Auckland, its hills, bays and gardens, to create precisely real compositions yet also imaginative summaries of the experience of remembering leafy, sleepy suburbs.

Aiding the effect of memory is the way the light is shown through the coloured glass of old-fashioned windows and doors, as well as the details of colonial weatherboard.

The exhibition also includes swooping westerly views with the Manukau Harbour in the distance; real, exact, but with the mist of memory on it.

The show has nothing new. It is an even recapitulation of Siddell's characteristic themes in a new medium. As such it lacks the sense of urgency the other two shows project but like them it is exactly linked to this country and its life.