Exhibitions Wellington

PETER IRELAND

Gillian Chaplin Photographs

Writing in 1970 on the occasion of a major exhibition by Georgia O'Keefe, Lloyd Goodrich said that 'the element of mystery which does exist in some works is due not to obscurity but to their clear-cut but enigmatic images and forms'. What O'Keefe has done through flowers and shells and boulders - the enlargement, the eliminating of distracting detail, the sensuous colour - Chaplin does with silks and tents and concrete tanks. But it is not even so much an enlargement as a re-scaling; not so much the elimination of detail as a distillation; not so much simply colour as a revelation of light.

The mystery and enigma arises from the ambiguity suggested in the particular treatment of the subject matter. What is termed 'subject matter' in these instances is merely that which appears as immediately obvious (petals, canvas, translucent fabric etc), and which serves as a point of departure from the particulars of the visual world to the larger subject matter. of what is comprehended rather than seen. So that while there are clues here of the 'real' world, such as clothes-pegs, tent-strings and grass, the wider concern is an exploration of the more abstract impressions of pure shape and pure colour. Here, in this flickering between the particular and the universal, the seen and unseen, is the source of the ambiguity. Without recourse to the quirkily surreal, or any descent to dry stylised design, Chaplin quietly but resolutely breathes life into the abstract.

This collection of twenty-one 35mm. and polaroid prints and three negative images, arranged in seven 'subject matter' groups, is a selection from the photographer's solo exhibition at Snaps last June. Compared with the work shown at the PhotoForum Gallery in Wellington in June 1978 (a joint show with Bruce Foster) this collection is more coherent, purposeful and vigorous, and reveals a tougher and more demanding approach by the photographer to her work.

The visually-splendid group of five Silk photographs has immediate drawing power. These prints have an extraordinary undersea quality (particularly Silk I) wherein time and motion are as suspended as the dreamily drifting bluer-than-blue fabric, with all the intensity and loveliness of Helen Frankenthaler's work (notably Silk III). This dream-like aspect is a recurrent feature of Chaplin's work: it is both a cause and an effect of the abstract character of it - the sense that time and motion are never quite stopped, and space never quite enclosed, but slowed down and delineated to a degree, with an awesome effect that total cessation and complete enclosure would not produce. Such 'distortion', ironically, seems only to heighten our perception of the nature of the object. Again, it is the transition from the particular to the universal. In the best of Chaplin's work such transitions assume almost a state of transubstantiation.

In the International Circus prints, for instance, the colour - rich damp blues and vivid rose-pinks - becomes Colour; and the facts of canvas and tents become irrelevant amid the riot. In the Tank group it is more a question of form: again, shape elevated to form. Tank I and Tank II tend to look back over, and sum up perhaps, Chaplin's work in the past two years; whereas Tank III and Tank IV, more austere, look forward to the more urgent and sinewy work of 1979.

Before approaching the most recent work, there is one final group of earlier photographs which are perhaps the apex of Chaplin's achievement before this year. They are the three with which this exhibition begins: Steps 1978, Phoenix Palm 1978 and Cypress 1978. The work has a rich gravity of colour and an austere simplicity of form, a polyphony of light and dark recalling Bocklin; the fugal grandeur of Phoenix palms; the cypress, as Lawrence said (and this suggests the mystery and enigma of the whole group), 'folded in like a dark thought for which the language is lost'.

That these are polaroid prints (enlarged from originals at 79mm x 78mm to 250mm x 240mm) and the most satisfying work, is no accident. With polaroid there is a further distortion of colour; clarity and crispness give way to rich and heavy tones, which ordinarily look merely odd. But in Chaplin's work these faded tones - faded in that everything seems to have a turqoise aura - actually heighten the colour. Again, the particular is transformed to the universal, which in turn becomes a revelation of particularity.

Nowhere is this better seen than in the group of Tent photographs of 1979. The strengths of the other work are concentrated here: yet the whole is greater than the aggregation. Tent II 1979 (number 9) is particularly fine. But the magic of a sudden vision, the recollection of a dream, a memory, an old song, is tempered by the uneasy sense that the world of these photographs is the world of the drowning man.

With two other groups... the three negative images may have been a useful experiment, but they do not seem much more than that, and it's an uphill struggle against silver mounts. Compared with the rest of the work, the two Birdlings Flat photographs seem unconvincing. They are loose and obvious, as though the photographer were having a day off and inadvertently strayed into a Bruce Foster landscape.

It is the enigmatic forms and images which persist. All that dedication and determination coming from Chaplin's work betrays a dissatisfaction with the garbled nature of things that guarantees the continuation of the unravelling. This is her gift in more senses than one. So that what for her initially is obscurity, is ultimately for us an unforeseen lucidity.