Bobbie Gray – Insignificant Other

Bobbie Gray – Insignificant Other

Central Gallery
25 September – 13 October
Opening: Saturday 25 September 2-4pm
Artist on site Sundays – TBC or contact gallery for dates

Insignificant Other brings everyday life into art through magnifying borer ‘galleries’ found in the native timber floors of the artist’s home.

Selected sections of chewed-out floorboards are magnified and presented as individual compositions, generating a language all of their own. They could be mistaken for words or symbols of some foreign or ancient language – the hieroglyphs of New Zealand’s heritage homes and buildings. Each work is meticulously finished with a precise colour palette, creating an aesthetic of contemporary design while portraying a feature common only to places of the past.

Poised between sculpture and painting, these hand-routed, human-scale engravings are traces of the vast, yet complex realities that lie beneath the surface of our own existence. The works read as abstract paintings, yet the mark making delves beneath the surface, revealing physical depth. The lines left are evidence of life lived, in parallel with our own.

Exploring perspective of self, Insignificant Other plays on the concept of sonder: the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as complex as your own. Through this new lens we are able to see ourselves as merely a tiny part of something infinitely bigger, allowing our day to day troubles to fade away.

About the Artist:

Bobbie Gray is a New Zealand born, Auckland-based artist whose work is founded in a range of disciplines including, sculpture, moving image, painting, installation, curation and project development.

Bobbie completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design in 2017. She was awarded a Highly Commended for her submission Resident Alien in the 2017 Eden Art Awards, of which her work Upward Fall is now part of the Wallace Arts Trust collection. Bobbie was a finalist in the Estuary Art Awards 2020 with her work A Fine Mess.

Current projects include Inflorescence, an immersive installation of 500 unique flowers made from plastic recyclables, illuminated by programmable LEDs and Insignificant Other, a series of sculpted paintings inspired by borer galleries in the artist’s home.

Bobbie has also exhibited internationally. A career highlight to date has been having her video, Digital Garden projected onto the internal walls of Coventry Cathedral, UK and in the Medina of Tunis, a World Heritage UNESCO site. And her video series Resident Alien was part of a touring exhibition Windows 98 in Iran.

Bobbie founded and facilitates an artist-run-initiative Comet Project Space, where she has curated several events which have a focus on creating a space where people can meet, generate connections and work collaboratively. Comet Project Space now operates as a pop-up gallery and platform for collaborative projects and community activations.