John Hurrell – 16 October, 2025

Dunedin artist, Nick Austin (one of the original members of Gambia Castle…remember them?) in this new Auckland show often makes pairings of (initially) unrelated found objects to form delicate conceptualist artworks with a new formally understated poetic resonance.

These are not ‘poems’ that might be overtly ‘arty’, but they are usually witty in a literary way, particularly found texts such as the show’s heading, where given titles seem to shift in their semantic emphasis. Sounds emitted from portable radios and exhaled freshly cleansed minty breath make a good example. It is clever work.

Some projects are more ambiguous in their potential interpretation, particularly because of Austin’s juxtapositions (if semantic clarity is to be valued), especially those in the series of non-paired, highly ambiguous, ‘signed’ artist-mirrors presented in ornate frames.

By focusing on self-esteem and branding careerist-identity, and how aspiring art ‘creatives’ can psyche themselves up by modelling themselves on admired art-historical predecessors (who here are female role models), viewers are invited to study their reflections in the gallery as potential artist heroines who naturally early on started by aspiring to great creative heights. It is possible sardonic irony might be intended. For either whole groups or the separately isolated individuals within them.

The installation Fear of Loneliness in particular is very droll, where violently bashed yellow tennis balls have been ferociously beaten against a unforgiving wall of concrete blocks, as if in a game of squash. They are fluffy and shredded, yet they have drawn marker-pen ‘facial smiles’—despite their constant, seriously scary, mutilation.

Elsewhere in the gallery, in an open egg carton, we see seven eggs lined up under seven portrait photographs of the Craig family egg-sellers, implying that these seven individuals were once ova, or that they also happen to enjoy eating hens’ eggs. Certainly they seem to enjoy marketing them.

Nearby we spot an Oak can that was originally used for baked beans, being presented on a small collapsable card table. The tin is holding a stack of newspaper crosswords. The pre-eminent clue at the front of the pile highlights the word ‘depends’ which in this context becomes ‘deep ends’ and the six netting pockets found in a billiard table. There is a detectable circular logic.

While it might be argued Austin is prone to cuteness or excessive sweetness in these ‘puzzle projects’, there is also enough underpinning grimness or obscurity here in these ‘mind game’ groupings to counterbalance such a cynical charge. The combinations of weird things does continue to hold your interest once you have figured out the underpinning linguistic structure.

It is not a problem at all. They remain compelling. Repeatedly so.

John Hurrell

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