Drawing on their geographic and professional histories, Janet Mazenier and Sarah Treadwell both create large abstract paintings.
Janet’s work explores familial accounts of Ireland set against her experiences of the physical landscape, while Sarah’s work is informed by her training and practice as an architect.
Janet Mazenier’s practice poses the question of what it means to be a contemporary artist living and working in Aotearoa New Zealand, with diasporic Irish heritage seeing and understanding place via the lens of an art practice. A psychological perception and sensation of liminal memories, histories, romantic and un-romantic, physical and sensed are gained through walking in Aotearoa and Ireland. Aotearoa’s environment of rich volcanic soils, black basalt rock, swampy mudflats and clear blue oceans contrast with Ireland’s landscape with its dolmen tombs, deep brown bogs, fissured stone and rare orchids.
Sarah Treadwell’s architectural drawings assemble limits and delineate shape and volume, lightly noting measurement and materiality. Usually black and white, straight and measured, architectural drawings have a spare elegance that belies the labour, physicality and complications of that most vivid architectural condition - the home. Sarah’s paintings seek to redress this gap between the professional and the everyday. Her work is informed by uncontrolled and wayward forces and desires, invisible scribbles and unseen geometry.
Left: Janet Mazenier, Verdant, 2024 (detail).
Right: Sarah Treadwell, Oceanic Section AA, 2022-24 (detail).
