Sarjeant: Beauty in darkness

Artwork by Lynn Hurst

Lynn Hurst's business card features a pistol toting pair of blue rompers floating in the dark, mid-air above a bullet-holed rabbit.

The rabbit also floats, above a board game that incites "cowboy" players to down the enemy Indians on the way to the finish line.

The rompers were her brother's, however the board game she found in New Zealand.

Although it references aspects of her own American upbringing and the childhood innocence with which she and her siblings played, with, often sinister cultural artifacts, the issues, such as the effects of colonization she draws attention to in this work and others are universal.

A selection of the Whanganui-based artist's digitally produced works feature in the Sarjeant Gallery's current exhibition "Interior Worlds", bringing together the work of six very different artists.

Ms Hurst grew up in Kentucky, US and much of her artwork draws upon her childhood, her memories and associations and later, adult reflections, through a creative process that is at once intuitive, and painstakingly detailed. A painter and sculptor "by trade" she began making digital artwork at a time when she did not have access to a studio.

Her still life digital prints reference the17thcentury Northern European Vanitas paintings in which Dutch and Flemish artists carefully chose objects that depicted both the ostentatious wealth of the times and the inexorable processes of death and decay. This "resonates today for a culture that is similarly fixated on fear and consumption," Ms Hurst said.

Featured in the exhibition is Vanitas/Hiroshima at the centre framed by a vintage television; Godzilla rears. The tableau is an arrangement of various artifacts that include a skull, butterflies, an electric fan, a pair of dice, seeds in pods, and a framed picture of the atomic mushroom above Nagasaki.

"Godzilla was a product of the nuclear holocaust, nuclear weapons and the mutations that can arise from dangerous experiments."

Butterflies are symbolic of transformation.

Ms Hurst uses everyday objects from her own home and the local environment, often picking things by colour and shape. She scans them on an A3 flatbed medical scanner. If the objects are large she scans them in parts, which she reassembles using Photoshop.

"In Vanitas/Hiroshima there are lots of little round circles that bounce all around the composition - dice, seeds in pods, and the buttons on the TV are the buttons off a 1940s coat that I turned sideways and inset on the TV frame.

"I also changed the numbers of seeds in the pods and on the dice - it's time consuming and the process is absurd. I often wonder why am I doing this but it does keep me calm. It's one of those repetitive things - you spend a lot of time cleaning, cutting out and layering - it can get frustrating and obsessive but it is a way of ordering the world."

She likens the process to collage where she would potentially have a thousand layers of paper on the piece.

Other more surreal prints bring together objects from childhood - a blouse she wore when she was three, snakes and ladders board games, gummy worms and datura flowers, noosed skipping ropes hung within a dark background.

"Nature is both a helper and an antagonist. There has always been an edge to my work. I like darkness combined with beauty, which is what the Renaissance painters did as well."

Hurst enjoys the different readings people make of her works. Some think the worms represent the snake in the Garden of Eden.

"I like that - it's a really interesting reading because to me that's what art should be - open enough so that people can put their own meaning. Sometimes I put things together and I don't know what I've done until later and then I go oh my gosh that's about ... "