Notes

Shane Cotton, the hanging sky 192 pages : chiefly colour illustrations The exhibition, Shane Cotton: the hanging sky, curated by Justin Paton, was organised by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu in association with the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, and showed in Australia and New Zealand in 2012 and 2013. (Colophon) Includes plates: (pages 52-183) Contents: The ghosts of birds / Eliot Weinberger -- Finding space : six encounters with Shane Cotton / Justin Paton -- Ever in between / Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow -- The treachery of images / Robert Leonard -- Plates Summary: Since the early 1990s Shane Cotton (Ngti Rangi, Ngati Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) has been one of New Zealand's most acclaimed painters of landscape and memory. In the mid-2000s, however, his work headed in an unexpected direction- skywards. Employing a sombre new blue-black palette, Cotton painted the first in a major series of skyscapes - vast, nocturnal spaces where birds speed and plummet. Since then the series has become increasingly complex and ambitious, incorporating ragged red skywriting as well as ghostly 'marked heads'. Combining major recent paintings with a spectacular body of new work, The Hanging Sky showcases Cotton's faith in painting as a space of possibility and provocation - a place of leaps, freefalls and charged collisions between images. (Christchurchartgallery.org.nz)