John Hurrell – 23 February, 2011

Corrina Hoseason’s installation in the small back room at UNITEC’s Snowwhite is a refreshing foil to the Nature Morte installation in the gallery’s front space. It’s invigorating because of its chuckly rural humour is in contradistinction to the other work’s more furtive and paranoid urban intensity.

Uncharacteristically, the porcelain vase Hoseason presents in that space - within a large solitary vitrine - is very painterly in its dribbly decoration, fitting well with the deceptively casual ‘slovenliness’ of Boyce and Brehaut’s display. Normally, as her current window display in Ponsonby at Objectspace as part of Matt Blomeley’s curated Best in Show 2011 reveals, she avoids intense colour, preferring a glossy white surface for urns which though referencing eighteenth century Sérves porcelain, have daisy chains and cattle and sheep mischievously inserted into the ornamentation and handles.

Without the paint they look aristocratic and courtly: the humour is not so obvious. The Objectspace works also include geese and show ponies - the latter broadening the livestock theme to include overtones of gymkhanas. The ceramic agricultural images could be a form of bragging about assets and property, like landscape painting used to be in say, the time of Gainsborough. However Hoseason’s positioning of poured matt colour on the vase out at Snowwhite divides it in two, with pale blue, white slip and silver one side and gold and purple the other. That abrupt division, so chromatically and tonally unbalanced, introduces an element of incongruity and comedy, especially with the pomposity of it being the sole object in the vitrine. It makes the urn come alive.

John Hurrell

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