New Zealand at the Venice Biennale 2009

In October 2008, when Daniel Birnbaum Artistic Director of the 53rd La Biennale di Venezia, announced the theme of the Biennale, the intersection between the concerns of the two projects already chosen to represent New Zealand and Birnbaum's ambitions was uncanny.

Birnbaum sets out to acknowledge the artist as a maker of worlds, and to place a strong emphasis on the making process — on what occurs in the studio or workshop. He explained that he would like the Biennale as a whole, including the selections for which he is responsible, to explore ‘worlds in the making’ through ‘proximity to the processes of production’. Other key points of enquiry are the relationship between some key artists and successive generations, and an exploration of drawing and painting.

In both Francis Upritchard and Judy Millar's practices, the work is created through its making. This may be stating the obvious, but increasingly a range of strategies to make their work is adopted by artists. For example, an artist may take on a role like that of a film director or a conceptual instigator, with the fabrication taking place off-site or by other specialists. There is no hierarchy of process inferred within Birnbaum's thematic emphasis but, in a time of an increased industrialization of art production, it is interesting to look again at the hand-made, and at the ways thinking occurs through working with paint on ground, or building forms and rendering them with colour.

For both Millar and Upritchard the studio is an important place, whether it be Millar's tall top lit building perched on a modest footprint of land above remote Anawhata on the windswept coast west of Auckland, or her work space in a large factory complex in Berlin where she applies and removes and applies gestural swooshes of form and colour onto giant grounds on the floor. Or Upritchard's gritty urban Hackney work space, where she and her assistants spend hours working fastidiously — making armatures, forming body shapes with tin foil and clothing them with skins of professional modeling compound, later to be baked in a commercial oven and then painted the psychedelic colours to which she is drawn.

However, to say that both artists are bound to the studio or that they subscribe to an isolationist mode of art production would also be incorrect.

Judy Millar is working with cutting edge digital reproduction and billboard printing methods to push the translation of her marks into vastly magnified planes. ‘Giraffe-Bottle-Gun’ will tower over and warp around the viewer, who will need to physically navigate and become part of the space to encounter the works. Thus a world will be created within the confines of San Maddelena through a combination of modestly-scaled painted works, giant digital skins stretched over building-sized frameworks and augmented by banners cascading from the exterior architecture.

Francis Upritchard also works with other specialists and collaborators to realize her works, particularly for glass blowing, the firing of ceramics and construction of furniture. In ‘Save Yourself’ she is constructing three tableaux taking the grand antique mirrors in three rooms of the lavish palazzo of Foundatione Buziol as a starting point. These crazed voids will form a backdrop to wooden table-like platforms that extend from the base of the mirror. Individual hand-made lights will illuminate the figures populating her landscapes. From the introspective Clan of Rob, a trippy rainbow-hued figure who meditates on his goals to start his own commune, to the effervescent Eel Dancer, frozen in a state of revelry, each cluster of figures has their own energy, their own purposeful mission. Desperately trying to achieve a better life, these seekers and dreamers are tender and hopelessly flawed as well as captivating and easy to relate to. While fantastic, the world that Upritchard creates is perhaps not so distant from our own.