Potters Pink is a Te Tuhi-commissioned solo exhibition by artist Katrina Beekhuis. In this exhibition, Beekhuis draws on her continuing research into the automatic process of perception to create a new body of work specifically for Te Tuhi’s gallery space.
During the process of perception, we filter light, sound and touch in order to conceive what a thing is, to give it a concept, to name or demarcate it. This calibration is a fundamental mechanism that helps us survive in the world – an ability to register something, then place it in the background of our consciousness. For example, knowing that the shiny metallic lump hurtling toward you is a car is important. Through this designation the car becomes classified and known but also singular and restricted.
Beekhuis offers visitors to the gallery a hesitation in this perceptive moment by presenting images, objects and drawings in which demarcations have been softened through processes of layering and inversion. This process can be seen in Wire drawing (roof netting) (2016), which takes the grid format of a section of roof netting and remakes it using trace wire. This wire is joined by heating each intersection over a low flame. Through retracing its making in this delicate way, the thing that’s produced offers a moment of duality, slipping between real-world object and artwork, sculpture and drawing, something and nothing.
In Potters Pink methods of decompression are inherent in Beekhuis’ process of making, where drawing, painting, modelling, photographing, scanning and printing move the works either toward the subjective or away, toward objective real-world models.
Beekhuis was the 2015 Te Tuhi Iris Fisher Scholar.
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