Lysha Brennan and Nick Toyne setting up for their exhibition at Community Arts Centre. The centre piece is a work by Nick entitled 'Someone made love in the clouds'. Photo / Paul Brooks
Lysha Brennan and Nick Toyne setting up for their exhibition at Community Arts Centre. The centre piece is a work by Nick entitled 'Someone made love in the clouds'. Photo / Paul Brooks
Three artists have come together to display their very different art in a group exhibition at Community Arts Centre. Lysha Brennan, Christina McGillan and Nick Toyne have created an eclectic display of two and three dimensional art.
Lysha is a teacher at Turakina and her association with Nick is from herearlier teaching days. "When I was at Keith Street School he was in one of my extension classes for art. I taught him screen printing. Now some of his art involves screen printing on glass," says Lysha. Nick would have been about 10 at the time. Lysha studied art at the Whanganui Regional Community Polytechnic when it was a three-year diploma course, then returned in the institution's UCOL days to complete her fourth year and gain her degree in Fine Arts. Lysha's part of the exhibition is called Trade. "It started off being about the trade of huia feathers." Her images in dry point wire evoke ecological impact on native flora and fauna, with birds being a major part of the show. "It's like a portrait gallery of the past," she says. In a culture without money, tribes occupying huia country sent feathers as gifts, or traded them with others. Lysha has used the huia bird and imagery of New Zealand floral and fauna to represent a time when such items were traded, with devastating consequences. Lysha has a never ending supply of wire after recently having her place rewired and scoring the old stuff for her art.
Nick was asked recently to be a part of the exhibition. "Because my work at the moment has been primarily about figurative things, so I've done a series of self-portraits ... I'd like to do a selection of figures in different mediums. It's an exploration of anatomy, identity and things like that. I've got glass, ceramic and plaster." One of the works is a large plaster sculpture too big to fit on a plinth. Christina's work consists of small, colourful paintings. The muted colour ones are based on her drawings and doodles and they were reworked to become composition for paintings. Other paintings began as loose drawings straight on to the board, more focused on colour and line.
The exhibition is on in the Community Arts Centre back gallery until December 19.
