The city provides gallery for artist’s exhibitions

Press, 28 November 1984, Page 22

The city provides gallery for artist’s exhibitions

Christchurch artist Lesley Maclean doesn’t have a normal gallery for her exhibitions — she has a whole town. Her work is seen by everybody — not just those who choose to visit a gallery. It can be found on billboards and on walls, in shop windows and in bars. Ms Maclean is a graphic artist who designs and screenprints posters for local theatre and bands. Ms Maclean does not believe in having exhibitions in established galleries, she prefers to see her work on walls around town. “There is a certain attitude when you go into a gallery, you have to either like a work or dislike it. You try and work out what the artist is trying to say or mean and have to draw some kind of conclusion from it,” she says. “If things are up around town, they are more immediate and are serving a purpose. You can respond to them intuitively. If they’re up, you can just walk past them, of you can stop and look at the colours, the poster and you can find out what is happening around the town at the same time.”

She disagrees with comments that posters on walk and billboards make a mess.

“Town is a mess anyway. You can’t say the posters don’t blend in with the surroundings, when all the shops have different window displays in a hotchpotch of different colours.

“Nobody gets a big kick out of looking at just walls, but you put something on them and they become interesting.” She has often thought of designing a poster — not as an advertisement, but as something to paste around town ‘just to brighten things up.” The posters she designs are destined to be covered up by the next lot of theatre or band posters and probably will not last more than

a week untouched. Isn’t that annoying? “That’s what I like about it. The walk are always changing, there’s always something new to look at.” However, there is something unacceptable about two groups of people competing for the same space and damaging the others’ work. She tells the story of a theatre group who were putting up their posters one day. Alongside was another group putting up theirs. Her friends asked the others not to paste up posters over the top of theirs, as it was all the advertising they had. “That really annoys me because a lot of people’s total publicity is posters.” The majority of Ms Mac lean’s work has been for the Free Theatre, although she has done some posters for' bands like “The Clean,” and,

more recently, “The Great Unwashed.” She has no set method of designing them, yet she definitely has her own style. Vivid colours are always a part of her work “because I like them and they draw people to them.”" She prefers to do the screen printing herself, as it means she can change something if it doesn’t look right in the final product. “If you do them with other people, you’re never sure what it is going to look like.”

It also costs less, which is usually an important factor for the groups she works for.

Occasionally she will put her name to a poster, but often it gets chopped off in the final print.

“I like to see names on them; it’s good to be able to look at a poster and see

how an artist’s style k developing.” Ms Maclean was born in Canada, and came to New Zealand when she was 10 years old.

On leaving school she completed the first two years of the vkual communication course in graphic design at Christchurch Polytechnic. She then started doing freelance work and got a job at a printing company doing screenprinting and artwork. At the moment she k employed under a Labour Department Project Employment Programme doing artwork, but works on posters in her spare time. She k about to begin making postcards to sell to local shops, for some extra income and as a means of extending her style. One problem she finds k

promoting herself and organking herself in a businesslike manner. That k one of the reasons she intends returning to the polytechnic next year to complete a third year at the course, which has a business management section. She wants to work on her style, and finds jobs screenprinting or doing artwork for a specific business limits her from doing that. She feek there k not enough support for local, young artists. “Certain types get supported because they are the “right” types like regular exhibition artkts.” “I would like to be able to live off my work, but I can’t at the moment. I could compromke myself and work for other people doing stuff I don’t like. ‘l’d rather live on nothing but do the things I want to do.”