The Museum of New Zealand recently exhibited Kate Newby's She's Talking To The Wall, a work consisting of nearly 1,000 individual units that took 10 years to make, from the remote Canadian island of Fogo to New York to Henga, Aotearoa. From Fogo Island, Canada, to New York City, to Henga, Aotearoa, the work's locations are connected in a unique journey, as Newby brings the outside world into the museum, creating a complex map of places, experiences, and relationships and connections, thus creating something larger than herself.

>Kate Newby, "Big Tree. Bird's Eye", 2016

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1979, Newby now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kataoka, who judged Newby's award-winning Crawl out your window (2010), described it as "the most subtle yet radical way to transcend fixed architectural space in contemporary art. It is Newby's masterpiece, a concrete ramp painted blue and inlaid with the artist's carefully chosen "crumbs"; a curtain dampens and filters the sunlight, thus separating the space, a discreet combination of "transcendence and banality" that makes Newby's artistic practice unique. In 2014, Frieze, a British art magazine, described Newby's work as "radically slight" and noted that, more importantly than other characteristics, it is a "earthwork in miniature". Newby sees and uses the poetic qualities of materials such as concrete, textiles, glass and ceramics to create a shared space of meditative textures. The seemingly mundane artifacts - ceramic wind chimes, road marks, glass hangings - seem to absorb the pleasurable elements of the environment, and her intervention in the site space is a response to its specific historical, geographical, and physical significance.

>Kate Newby, Big Tree. Bird's Eye, 2016

>Kate Newby, Reclaim the Earth, 2022

Newby's 2018 solo exhibition, A puzzling light and moving, came out of her year-long residency program. For the exhibition, Newby removed the original glass from the gallery's window frames and replaced it with her handmade glass, which resembled melting ice cubes. Echoing this, she arranged a group of sculptures on top of the building outside the block, thus drawing the viewer's eye to the rooftops of the city outside the windows, and she expanded the perception of the exhibition in an ambiguous but dramatic way. When the viewer turns indoors, the work I love you poems (2018) leaps out onto the windowsill, a collection of coarse pottery in the shape of oysters of varying sizes, with a melting glaze that looks like dew collected from nature and made from discarded glass the artist found on the street, appearing as a cryptic footnote. Newby says, "I wanted to create a puddle to collect some of the rainfall in Portland, Oregon. ...... I'm going to leave the puddle there, and that will change with the seasons in Portland, and I hope that snow, dust, trash, anything will make it an evolving piece." Thus came another work, "Nothing that's over so soon should give you so much strength," a red concrete located outside It is an outdoor red concrete puddle that contains details of the ceramics Newby created for it. Buried throughout the exhibition are the artist's carefully placed ambiguities, which are perhaps not layered, her conception of space perhaps more akin to the stream-of-consciousness narrative of the writer Woolf. While Newby strives to conceal her control over the environment, she ties together her sensual consciousness in a sensitive and ethereal way, the scene is also a universe generated by the artist, and at the center of the universe floats Newby herself, where her existentialist visual poetry shimmers. Collector Sarah Miller Meigs has described the exhibition, "She is very active in the presence of the world, she notices every little detail, she guides the viewer to look deeper rather than hastily, and here she conveys a more mysterious viewing experience."

> Kate Newby, The January February March

Words play an integral role in Newby's work, conveying both her observations and her meditations. Newby has named her work after fragments of poems by Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and other poets, creating poetic spaces that coincide with the poets' reflections on the everyday. Newby is a type of artist who deals with "everyday life" in an "existentialist" way, breaking the limits of space through her art and inviting the viewer to rethink the interior and exterior of a live space, the metaphysical and the subterranean. The fleeting moments marked by the artist are transformed one by one into tiny revelations that she picks up, so that the "everyday" she sees transcends the ordinary, but this does not make it more mysterious or grandiose; perhaps she simply stimulates the "rebellious" moments of the everyday. As Gaston Bachelard puts it, the dialectic between the inner and the outer is not only about closure and openness, but also about being and non-being, which "are always waiting to be reversed in exchange for their confrontation."

> Kate Newby, Crawl out your window, 2010

Newby's practice is rooted in a type of "collecting" in which she collects not finished objects, but different material materials and fragments of consciousness about them, which contain memories and traces of having been certain kinds of objects, and Newby perceives and captures their return to material materials. In Newby's work, no matter which medium she chooses, handmade is always emphasized as a labeling visual feature, which can perhaps be interpreted as meaning that handmade traces provide an exchangeable and precious individual experience. At the same time, Newby's works are quiet and microscopic, sometimes they emanate a puzzling light, and the improvisational details she creates for the live space resemble fresh moss she has planted in the space. Newby often finds "phrases" of interest in ceramics and glass, ceramic units that appear to be stalactites or geological specimens of some kind, and as they sway and collide with the air or the movement of people in the field, the chiming sounds stimulate the viewer's sensual awareness, and in this way Newby responds to the field with her work, instantly gaining access to what the field gives her. In this way, Newby responds to the scene with her work, and instantly obtains the results that the scene gives her.

> Kate Newby, A puzzling light and moving,2018

Article Source:艺术与设计

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