Jude Rae

Jude Rae is the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s first Visiting Artist for 2006. She is a painter from Canberra, Australia, who spent several years in New Zealand in the 1990s and continues to exhibit here regularly. Rae has been described by Bruce James of the Sydney Morning Herald as a ‘highly original painter in the process of unfolding’, and her Australasian reputation rests chiefly on the still-life paintings she has created over the last decade, and the portrait paintings she has been making in the 2000s.

Arriving in Dunedin in late April for a six-week residency, Rae was separated from the still-life objects she ordinarily paints, and from the people she calls on as subjects for her paintings. She resolved instead to familiarize herself artistically with what was newest and nearest to her: the walls and windows, lights and spaces, of her studio on the first floor of a building called Victoria Chambers on Crawford St. Like many of Rae’s subjects, the room is nothing special – a modest space with high windows and some eccentric architectural modifications. But it has always been Rae’s practice to begin with ordinary or undramatic things, and work to remind us how complex, rich and unsettling the experience of these things can be when a viewer’s perceptions are fully focused.

At first working on a small scale, Rae soon began to create views of the room that are themselves almost ‘architectural’ in scale. Standing close to one of the works, the subtle gradings of grey in grey engulf a viewer’s field of vision. As in her still-life paintings, the point and pleasure of these drawings lies in the tension between illusion and material. On one hand, Rae’s acute use of the charcoal medium conjures spaces of great depth and ‘realism’. On the other hand, Rae uses zones of dense black charcoal or bare paper to pull the image back into a flatness that is almost abstract in effect.

The result is a portrait of an interior that is as patient and mindful as her portraits of real people. Indeed, the word ‘interior’ is a loaded one for Rae, who gave the title ‘Interiors’ to her recent series of portraits. The word refers to the room in which her portrait subjects sit, but also to the psychological interior – the headspace – which portrait paintings can evoke but never fully reveal.

As well as light and space, Rae’s drawings also richly evoke a sense of studio time. Windows filled with darkness evoke a night-painter’s sessions working late in the studio. The chair in one drawing echoes the chairs that have appeared in her recent portrait paintings, except that in this case it has no occupant. Despite this absence, Rae’s drawings do not indulge popular, almost cliché, notions about the Gothic or vacant character of Southern interiors. Within and between these stilled and ‘empty’ spaces, there emerges a powerful impression of the unseen but active presence of the artist herself, working with stick after stick of charcoal to accumulate her record of what and how she saw.

The Visiting Artists Programme is supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.