Griffiths & Currin are both process led painters who utilise the expressive power of the gestural mark, alongside a limited palette to great effect. While their work is pictorial in appearance, its emphasis is underpinned by evocative mark making, that employs a form of lyrical abstraction, which is open to interpretation. Their process led approaches to the language and medium of painting, allows each to create resonant and ambiguous images which shift between the real and imaginary – pushing at the medium’s potential for depth and meaning.

The subject matter of Belinda Griffiths new series: Drift is largely drawn from an unexpected encounter with driftwood at Otarawairere Bay. The deserted beach was strewn with sun bleached driftwood and Griffiths couldn’t help gather up a few pieces to take back to the studio. Since then she keep returning to that driftwood collection – the idea that something could start off as a fallen branch and set off on a journey through the elements, which shape and nurture it, before landing on a beach somewhere as a small exquisite sculpture. This served as a starting point for Belinda’s latest body of work, Drift where a figure wanders through an unidentifiable landscape, lost in thought, immersed in their natural surroundings.

Garry Currin’s dramatic land paintings are a mixture of the romantic, apocalyptic and the sacred all at once. Currin’s atmospheric images, capture both the beauty and the turbulence of the natural environment. His work possesses a sense of the ‘terrible sublime’ associated with Romantic landscape painting and twentieth century abstraction – describing both the awe and raw power of the natural world – while hinting at the forces which have created it. His lyrical brush work and rich layered tones, create a radiant depth of hue, that at times seems to emerges from the land itself, capturing both the solidity of the land and its instability. Both exhibitions provide us with a visual mediation of humanities ever shifting relationship with the land, our connection to it, and our sense of the spiritual.