Graham Fletcher’s seven new paintings featured in Twilight’s Edge and produced since his time as artist-in-residence (February – June, 2021) are both a continuation and departure from the narrative technique he has consistently employed in his work. In 2010 Fletcher first showed a group of paintings that combined 1950s and 60s architecture. These were like the pages of modernist magazines with interiors awash with stylish furniture and design and cultural artefacts. These works grouped under a banner of ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’ were inspired by a number of private collections of tribal art which led to Fletcher researching the critical legacy of Oceanic or African tribal art in domestic settings and how this legacy might be subverted within a contemporary Pacific and New Zealand context. As an extension of this, the paintings in Twilight’s Edge evoke a similar feeling of tension. Here Fletcher collages together a variety of imagery from different sources and in doing so there is a strange kind of disconnection between what is real, imagined and reconfigured.
Fletcher used his time as artist-in-residence to compile what he terms a ‘treasury of information’ – visual records of Whanganui and things he saw while he was here. These included photographs taken while exploring the city – Virginia Lake where he regularly walked, Durie Hill, Castlecliff and further afield Hiruharama on the Whanganui River; research online; collecting ephemera and making drawings. On return to his home in Ōtepoti Dunedin Fletcher collaged all these elements together, to create new composite landscapes, sparsely populated by shadowy figures, sentinel like carvings and skinny dogs that look like they have wandered into the scene from a Paul Gauguin painting.
The landscapes in Twilight’s Edge were also inspired by a number of modernist artists painting celestial bodies or events – Harald Moltke’s images of the Northern Lights, Georgia O’Keeffe’s sunrise works, and Felix Vallotton’s sunset paintings. Fletcher describes having the paintings in his studio as being akin to working on multiple puzzles all at the same time where eventually “the work tells me – ‘That’s enough!’ Ultimately each work is self-contained, but strength is in the grouping”.
Images of the new works in Twilight’s Edge landed in my inbox a couple of months ago but it wasn’t until they were unpacked in the collection store to be photographed, awaiting their time in the Gallery that their jewel like qualities became apparent. However, sometimes we stumble across paintings that take time to percolate- they stay with you, but you can’t quite figure them out. Their narratives are not fixed – they are what Fletcher describes as ‘puzzles’.
It wasn’t until recently when I was on my way home along the Whanganui River on my bike, chasing the failing light that Fletcher’s new works clicked. The awa (river) was at ‘Twilight’s Edge’ and the water was like a perfect mirror. Despite it being a time of the day when everything is at the edge of rest, there were strange things happening in the mirror of the river. Everything was a bit discombobulated like Fletcher’s paintings that are occupied by skinny dogs, elegant leggy blue trees, portals and a lake filled with what looks like currents crossed with electric eels.
The landscapes in Fletcher’s paintings have suggestions of time spent in Whanganui but in other ways these composite landscapes could be anywhere in the Pacific. Perhaps that’s why they’re unsettling, in a post-covid environment of a heightened sense of place, these works are curiously ‘not of this place’.
- Greg Donson, Curator & Public Programmes Manager, exhibition text for 'Twilight's Edge' Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui 27 August 2022 - 20 November 2022