Curatorial Statement | Artist's Résumé

The thing Ngäpuhi artist Darryn George values most of all is 'the freedom to be experimental'. He says he is 'interested in building up stores of ideas through research' which allows him to reinvent himself along the way. George is primarily an abstract painter, although he manages to weave a considerable amount of social content into his paintings. His practice moves between pared back minimalism and work which incorporates Rorschach inkblot images, graffiti, slot car track shapes, spills and stains on the road. Often the social content of George's work is hidden, or disguised under layers of paint, pattern and colour. George's paintings often feature jarring and discordant colour combinations and optical effects which deliberately hark back to the 1960s. As Felicity Milburn has noted, George 'uses the Op Art and Pop Art visual language of the baby-boomers as the background for subliminal and iconographic images portraying the present day consequences of their morality, namely prostitution, pornography, drug abuse and an electronic gangster rap-inspired youth crime culture.'

George's work in Telecom Prospect 2004 is from his ongoing 'Tipuna' series which has its starting point in the Poutama (Stairway to Heaven) design found in tukutuku panels of meeting houses. 'I was particularly attracted', George explains, 'to the conceptual idea behind the Stairway to Heaven design, in that it pointed to Tane (an ancestor) who had gone on before the people and who had gone into heaven.' The titles of the works in the 'Tipuna' series are Maori transliterations of the names of Biblical characters (other ancestors of faith who have gone to Heaven). Like tukutuku panels which convey genealogy and history, George's paintings create a genealogy of Maori and Christian belief systems that has direct relevance to his own life.

Sarah Farrar