Some buildings in Tararua have no windows. They have stood through winds that batter everything built and growing here. Rugged strength, holding fast and earning their place as fixtures of the land. Woodville artist Seona Ashton brings this theme to life with her brush - almost against the plan -painting what lasts, what is added and what is lost. She creates an honest connection between the viewer and the work, a tribute to what was and what is.
Her work hangs in Rinitawa Gallery in Woodville, a rotating exhibition space built on the principle that every work gets an equal chance to be appreciated. Each exhibit has its own spotlight, so no artwork gets lost to shadows.
While Ashton has exhibited before, this was her first showcase of a full bay display. Pointing to work by another artist who had hesitantly put their painting in for the very first time, Ashton said, “Like most new artists, they think they’re not good enough.” She spoke about overcoming shyness as being one of the most important steps local creators can take. Fortunately, a high school teacher with a particular interest in abstract art encouraged Ashton to enter a competition early on, and two of the pieces the teacher put forward won prizes.
Ashton, who had taken maths and science first, says aspects of those subjects carries through many of her pieces today. Her current display was acrylic, water and gel paints, and experimenting sometimes mixing them together. The landscapes come with a confident hand: the rolling hills of Tararua and Manawatū. A common accent is Wharite Point as a datum point that anchors the composition from the top, and her eye for red rusting barns. Her interest, though, is abstract. “An abstract work would do really well in a doctor’s office, somewhere you have to sit and wait,” Ashton says, “because you can look at it again and again and see something different each time.”
Tararua, my Home is where the two styles meet: a large canvas combining scenic and abstract work in acrylic and gel paint. Ashton calls it, "an homage to the trees that used to be here." The composition of the painting was built up from the yellow, until the hillside broke open and revealed layers of depth and complexity.
The eye lands first on a broad pale hill under a windswept blue sky. Ashton waited to paint in what the clouds usually hide, giving a futuristic purpling to the windmills they represent. The lower right figures depict the jagged nature of an emptying river bed as it copes throughout the season. The summer grasses are magnified and the textures captured like sample portions set out on plate. Ashton speaks on how the grasses look dry and the hills go a parched golden colour, that the ground is not truly dry, not really. On the Woodville side of the Ruahine Ranges, the foothills snag passing cloud and wring it out, so even during the dry months the paddocks hold on to some moisture.
Along the crest stands a row of tall greening shapes, and the duality of palette and thought intersects. One representation is the poplars that now line so much of the central areas along the river, and also the trunks of the original trees that were chopped. The beheaded canopies laid side by side. Each canopy top when zoomed in closer, is its own rolling hill of careful blending. The spaces between the trunks, Ashton says, replaced the natural bush.
Laid down to dry out, the windrows of hay are dissected and investigated. Scratched into the paint, marking it and lifting it off the surface, and adding to the raw geometry of the patchwork. Like looking to the fields through venetian blinds, playfully asking the viewer to hypothesise; is the painting yellow with gold stripes, or golden with yellow stripes?
The Sister hills of Dannevirke crown the new highway, painted while the road was being constructed. They partition the various townships and yet leave them connected. Rivers cut through this country first. Highways and bypasses are the faster, modern version of this act, while Wharite Point holds like a needle on a compass. It's one thing that stays the same no matter how dry the spell is, or how soaked the sod is.
The barn in the lower left corner was the very last addition. Ashton had intended to leave that corner blank - a resting bench for the viewer's eyes to ease the fatigue of scanning - but felt the painting required it. Ashton used gel paint, transferred from greaseproof paper onto the canvas, and the effect is undeniable. It leaves the corrugations of the iron sheets looking embossed and etched against the sepia tones. It has no windows, just like the Rinitawa Gallery arena.
Overall, it's a quilt that never feels quite like a quilt. The piece harmonises beautifully across the different sections. It becomes adaptable and accepting of change, and Ashton boldly paints it - free of verdict or resistance - just, resonance.
The painting never raises its voice to tell the viewer how they should feel about any it, and that is exactly why it carries so well. The edges stay unsoftened and the canopies stay severed. The cream negative space works behind the scenes like a megaphone, adding to its charisma and welcoming the viewer to sit, ponder, engage. I stood in front of it unable to say whether it was more of a celebration or a reminder, and the work allowed for that uncertainty space and somewhere to stand, in an honest and timeless way.