Wolden and Joblin

Press, 20 February 1986, Page 29

Wolden and Joblin

Peter Wolden and Debbie Joblin:Two exhibitions at the James Paul Gallery, until February 22. Reviewed by John Hurrell.

Peter Wolden is known in Christchurch as a painter, but in recent years he has been incorporating his own photographs into his artworks. Normally these photographs are combined with loose canvas supports and with gestural methods of mask marking. Twenty-four works are displayed in the James Paul Gallery, using snapshots taken in Melbourne in 1983. The photographs show vertical metal shields, painted yellow, that serve as screens to partly protect people waiting at tramstops against the weather. So that they can see when trams are approaching, a horizontal slot is positioned at head height. Wolden’s photographs refer to Ned Kelly’s suit of armour and in their punning title of "Transportation Masks” to Australia’s convict heritage The Images are fastened to rectangles of cotton duck, laminated with plastic, and then pinned to the wall in a horizontal frieze that goes round three walls. Often the

same photograph is repeated so that the artwork seems never-ending, like the river of traffic that is viewed through the slots in the shields.

Instead of being seen as isolated artworks, these images are best read as connected sequences within one large work. Exposures taken in the early morning alternate with others taken in the midday sun, and cars and pedestrians varying in their positions, moving forward and backwards chronologically. Sometimes they are in focus, and sometimes the shields themselves are, with their glued-on coloured posters.

Through his title and the activities viewed through the slots, Wolden is making general comments about Australia’s history and its national psyche. Yet by using traditional painting methods such as canvas supports and his own large pencilled signature, he is claiming something special about his own psyche as well, and this acts as an incongruos foil for the impersonality of the traffic images. Much more personal and conceptually resolved works are found in the photographs of Debbie Joblin, who has been taught by Wolden. Her photographs consist of six images of individual members of her family, standing on the back steps of their farmhouse near Lake Ellesmere. Sometimes they are seated indoors.

Each person photographed is wearing an item of clothing made of patterned fabric that has been silkscreened by the artist. The same material worn by the sitter is used to make a wide quilted frame for the same photograph. It has the photograph machine-stitched on to a flat section in their middle. There are subtle varia-

tions within these six works, both in the organisation of the stitching lines and in the expressions of the sitters.

For the artist’s parents, their material union is symbolised by their marital of different colours being juxtaposed together to make up the frame. By filling the patterned materials with padding, the quilted frame becomes a kind of metaphor for the human body. With the exception of the artist’s mother, the people photographed look vulnerable and in some sense defeated, reminiscent of the photographs of American Indians who thought their souls might be captured by the workings of the photographic process.

Their sense of vulnerability in the photographs is accentuated by the padded material which surrounds them, so that, the flat image seems like an opening out of which the filling has escaped and which has left an aperture into the body. These are two closely related intelligent exhibitions which complement each other perfectly. The sophisticated manner in which the photographs have been presented adds considerably to their meaning.