Smoke and Bones

Auckland artists Mo Stewart and Catherine Robertson.
Paintings employing playfulness, mingling with the seriousness of the deeper mind.

Mo Stewart’s black and white works will take the viewer into a mesmerizing journey into the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. An exploration of what lies beneath the surface. In abstract she is able to fully realize this fascination with the psychological landscape and it is here that she is able to confront the viewer with a portrait of their own psyche.

This is not to imply that her work is somehow a Rorschach blot of clinical divination. Instead, there is a playfulness that mingles with the seriousness of the deeper mind. One is exposed to the light and dark that lurks beneath the surface of one’s own mind. In this her works allow you to delve deeper, at once fearsome and exhilarating.

Catherine Robertson paints and sculpts, she is a shoe designer for Ziera and her dachshund Harriet has over 3,000 followers on Instagram!

The work starts with the discarded, fragmented and forgotten - images torn from old newspapers, pieces of broken bumper in the gutter, children’s toys salvaged from the dump.

Inspired by Prunella Clough’s work and point of view and the way she would find beauty even in a discarded sweet wrapper on the footpath. It satisfies Robertson to take overlooked and valueless items and transform them into works that might be seen as mysterious, imperfect and strange.

She likes working in a detached way and deliberately avoid having any firm expectations of what the end result might be. The creation of these works is largely material driven and experimental.