Kate Newby: Small Gestures
The work of acclaimed New Zealand artist Kate Newby wrings poetry from the quotidian – while remapping the places where art and life intersect.
Image credit: Kate Newby, I’ll be here Sunday, 2018, stoneware, glaze, wire, 39 x 5 x 7 cm. Courtesy the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland
For Kate Newby, the most meaningful encounters with art don’t have to unfold inside a gallery. They can exist in the space between the self and the world. A few hours before we speak, the New Zealand-born artist, 40, arrived in Los Angeles from Te Henga or Bethells Beach – the coastal North Island community where she spent most of her childhood. It was like she’d never visited before.
“It was amazing to be back as I hadn’t been there for so long – it was so nice to see it with fresh eyes,” says Newby, who (mostly) lives in Brooklyn. She’s bright and thoughtful, prone to sincere and plainspoken sentiments – much like the art for which she is renowned. “I grew up near a lake, near dunes with black sand.” Her voice grows quieter, more reflective. “There was so much organic intensity.”
Newby makes sculptures, installations and interventions. But art-world parlance, with all its loaded history, doesn’t quite capture the way her work sparks subtle shifts in perception that can knock the viewer sideways. Or the little bubbles it creates on the surface of reality, tiny ruptures that help you see the world more clearly – or alter what you think you know.
The artist has installed concrete rocks that double as seats at Fort Greene Park and hired abseilers to string red rope along the roof of a building on Redcliff Street in Welsh Back, Bristol. She’s made blown-glass bags in collaboration with a Texas glassblower in Marfa. Later, she suspended these delicate, glimmering objects from the ceiling as part of Swift little verbs pushing the big nouns around (2018), her show at Auckland’s Michael Lett Gallery. (Newby, a long-time fan of the
New York School of Poets, borrowed the title from Mal Maison, an Eileen Myles poem.)
At Bring Everyone (2019), her solo show at Fine Arts, Sydney, she replaced the room’s window panes with sheets of glass, pocked with holes that are at once violent and inviting. First, they look like the traces of an accident; but soon the work appears porous, permeable. In the wake of the state’s bushfires, the summer light is reddish and ethereal. It filters through the perforations and instantly, I want to poke my fingers through.
“Often you can only ever look at art and I love the idea that you might get to physically touch, move and encounter [my work],” Newby smiles. “I love art that is ambiguous. And I’m okay with a really small audience. People are always telling me, ‘No one will see that, Kate’ when I place something really small on the top of a building, and I’m always like, ‘I know.’ ”
Newby always knew that art was important. “My father was a potter and both my parents were artistically curious,” she says. She decided to become an artist as a 15-year-old. “It was as if a light got switched on and I didn’t question it.” She attended the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, starting as a printmaker before finding a home in sculpture.
“[Through] sculpture, there was this idea that you could incorporate any kind of situation, any kind of landscape, people,” she says. “I had tutors like P Mule and Michael Parekowhai who were encouraging me to step into something a bit more unknown when I was young and vulnerable.”
She found a sense of kinship at Gambia Castle, an artist-run space on Auckland’s Karangahape Road whose founding members included Fiona Connor, Tahi Moore and Simon Denny.
“The idea that as an artist you’re an island makes me sad but at [Gambia Castle] we formed a real community,” says Newby, who’s speaking with me from Connor’s LA apartment. “We had dinners on Monday nights where we would talk in-depth about our exhibitions.”
At Gambia Castle, shows such as 2008’s Thinking with your Body – which saw the artist drape mottled muslin cloths in front of the gallery’s windows and install a mural with the words ‘plants songs food clothes’ – hummed with the ideas that would define her practice. Chief among these were the relationship between inside and outside spaces, the importance of creative generosity and the idea that everyday life could be both quotidian and poetic.
Then came Crawl Out Your Window. For the 2012 show, which took place at Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Brenan, Germany, Newby made a concrete ramp embedded with crystals, rocks and bottlecaps near the banks of a tidal river, where she also placed small sculptures bearing words such as ‘windy’, ‘sleeping’ and ‘Saturday morning’. It cemented her new working method – one that swaps a studio to work in situ, responding to place, circumstance and serendipitous encounters. She won New Zealand’s biggest contemporary art award,
The Walters Prize.
“I had an empty suitcase, flew to Germany where I’d never been, and [the site] was this ginormous space by the river and I remember thinking, ‘Oh goodness,’ but it [set the stage] for how I work now where I try to navigate people and production in a short amount of time,” she explains. “I hadn’t realised that the river was tidal. It became about how to give your artwork the chance to return back to the lived environment.”
Some of Newby’s most profound works are shaped by flux, enlisting the help of natural forces. On a 2014 residency in Fogo Island, off icy Newfoundland, Canada, she made a pothole at the end of a walking track, designed to fill up and freeze over. At Fine Arts, Sydney, there’s a large softground etching called Wouldn’t that be enough (2019), marked with scratches, squiggles and splodges that feel somehow electric, alive. She created the etchings, part of a series of three made in San Antonio, Norway and Portland, by placing 12 plates covered in soft wax on a rooftop so they would become inscribed with crows’ movements.
“I love that I’m inserting myself into this process of transformation,” she says, “but not predicting what the outcome will be.”
Newby travels with a copy of Lunch Poems (2019) by Frank O’Hara, one of her favourite poets. O’Hara’s writing finds its force in the accretion of tiny details, about how small moments like sharing a Coke with a lover, waiting to cross at the traffic lights, can create cracks in our daily existence that let life pour in. Newby’s own work, such as I can’t nail the days down (2019), her solo show at Vienna’s Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz – her first institutional exhibition in Europe – also tries to cultivate this radical attentiveness, the notion that there’s something to see in drift and detritus. She observed the texture of Vienna streets. Then, she covered the floor of the gallery with 6000 bricks, their surface scratched and carved, implanted with ceramic stones, melted glass and miniature twigs made from brass and silver.
“When your work is not reading in a way that feels genuine, you can feel it, but there was a real gravity,” Newby grins. “People were intrigued that you had to move over the surface of the work to see it. It was about touch, about navigation and discovery. And although [the space] was empty, it felt filled up at the same time.”
Kate Newby is represented by Michael Lett, Auckland, Fine Arts, Sydney, Cooper Cole, Toronto and The Sunday Painter, London.
michaellett.com
finearts.sydney
coopercolegallery.com
thesundaypainter.co.uk
Image credit: Kate Newby, We’ve all been hot and needed to cut off a pair of our own jeans, 2018, bronze, wire, 27.5 x 6.5 x 8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland
Image credit: Kate Newby, I would give it another chance and go back, 2017, bronze, jute, sisal, fixtures, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland
This article was originally published in VAULT Magazine Issue 29 (February – April 2020).
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