Hannah Joynt
Grey Willow
Opening Friday 2nd August 2019
Runs to August 21
The Grey Willow arrived with early European setters in the 1860's. It thrives near waterways, lakes and wetlands and like many introduced species, Grey willows have colonised so successfully that they have made it onto the National Pest (plant) List. Harts Creek on Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere is a place where their spread of is seriously endangering native plants and have been categorised as an infestation. Yet, when I journeyed through the Harts Creek here I found the trees mesmerising and tranquil. My intrigue and desire to use this place as the main subject as my latest body of chalk pastel drawings comes from the natural tension between my experience of the place and the environmental reality of the pest plant. In addition to pastel, dark tones and shadows are rendered using willow charcoal. I use it deliberately to make a material connection to my subject. However, the charcoal becomes amalgamated with other pigments and the shadows step from black into various tinted darks. Colour palettes are exaggerated to melodramatic levels, compositions are cropped to oppress space and texture is depicted with excessive application. All elements indicate saturation, things are almost overwhelmed. A metaphor reflective of the subject in many ways.
Hannah Joynt, 2019
''Grey Willow'' Hannah Joynt (olga)In her latest suite of chalk pastel drawings, Hannah Joynt explores the tension of the grey willow as both a plant of beauty and a ''pest''. Her depiction of grey willows comes from a sustained engagement with the plant in Harts Creek on Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere.
Joynt deploys a heightened palette of intense, saturated colour in an attempt to capture the tension of a plant that, while beautiful, is endangering native plants to the extent that it has been categorised as an infestation.
With the knowledge that the grey willow was brought by colonialists in the 1860s, and spread widely around riverine and other bodies of water such as lakes and wetlands, Joynt's pastel drawings symbolically represent the arrival of Pakeha to Aotearoa and the subsequent dislocation of tangata whenua from their traditional lands.
Joynt narrates this story compositionally by cropping the field of vision and working in a high-key colour palette that signals, or perhaps, tugs between suffocation and beauty. In a pointed gesture Joynt has created the dark tonal areas with charcoal from the willow tree.
It is as if a part of the willow is drawing itself through Joynt. Through this layering of the visual and the material (the materiality of willow charcoal), Joynt's series raises timely discussions of ecological (im)balance, particularly in a settler colonial context.
Robyn Maree Pickens, Otago Daily Times, August 2019
Joynt deploys a heightened palette of intense, saturated colour in an attempt to capture the tension of a plant that, while beautiful, is endangering native plants to the extent that it has been categorised as an infestation.
With the knowledge that the grey willow was brought by colonialists in the 1860s, and spread widely around riverine and other bodies of water such as lakes and wetlands, Joynt's pastel drawings symbolically represent the arrival of Pakeha to Aotearoa and the subsequent dislocation of tangata whenua from their traditional lands.
Joynt narrates this story compositionally by cropping the field of vision and working in a high-key colour palette that signals, or perhaps, tugs between suffocation and beauty. In a pointed gesture Joynt has created the dark tonal areas with charcoal from the willow tree.
It is as if a part of the willow is drawing itself through Joynt. Through this layering of the visual and the material (the materiality of willow charcoal), Joynt's series raises timely discussions of ecological (im)balance, particularly in a settler colonial context.
Robyn Maree Pickens, Otago Daily Times, August 2019