The general concept of this exhibition is to reshow a large loose canvas titled Museum of the Vernacular which was shown at the Depot in Auckland where some debate on the vernacular has been taking place.

My ideas of the vernacular are tied to a certain basic use of language and the colloquial. Also important to certain focus on old timber and the rural, on the roughly realised and partly broken, on memory and loss. Most words are my own. My work needs to be understood as much for what I leave out as for what I include.

I suppose my kiwi world is hanging around as a legend or lament. It really doesn’t matter if it still exists or has been buried by time and change. It’s probably found in a dark shed in a distant paddock surrounded by half felled bush and broken rusted machinery. It has a certain debt to my poet father and memory of a childhood on orchards.

However, my paintings also strongly seek to be relevant to the now by offering an alternative vision.

In creating the world shown here I am deeply influenced by where I live by a wild coast with a wild sea at Cosy Nook surrounded by old trees , a barn , bush on the hill, axes and hammers, flowers, vegetable gardens, male and female, a house and a home, birds constantly and children some times. The works are poems in contemplation. Old ghosts such as Baxter and the man in the black singlet are never at rest and have little respect for time and place. A few works done at Paradise up from Glenorchy are examples of field work I do to gather new material and engage directly as a break from my own intuition.

It would be good to think the exhibition has a purpose beyond escapism and defending simple pleasures and life styles that question more complex and artificial ways of being. In one sense they might be comfort food but in another sense there are harsh echoes from the back of beyond telling us in the here and now to get a grip and remember where many of us came from.

Nigel Brown – Southland 2014

Please contact the gallery for current availability of works.