The following paragraphs are from a short text by Rebecca Nash that accompanies Le Lievre's exhibition:

"In Marie Le Lievre's new 'Catcher' series, we see MLL consider her previous artistic vocabulary whilst also leaping into other mind pools. Threads connecting this work to her oeuvre include her exploration of the formal properties of paint (dense slicks interplaying with iridescence, transparency, cirrus wisp, the movement of water). Thematically, we see her continue in her examination of the interplay between the concrete and the abstract; the thick bubble of the unconscious mind. Into these threads, she adds literal new threads as she criss-crosses them into organic grids."

And on the grid as loosely woven net or filter, Nash adds:

"The creative space, however, requires a complete redefinition of what the mind catcher is to filter out and what to filter in. The artist wants to open the floodgates for the unconscious mind; to flow through with it, losing all trace of the petty and the daily and the necessary. Thus, the mind catcher itself is a thing in flux, rather than a static thing. It must dynamically shift in its sifting according to social constraints, to situation, to mental health, to disaster, to weather. This shifting is analogous to the way that MLL's paint is in flux between its formal, abstract qualities and its leap into the concreteness of actual objects, and sometimes, its leap further into symbol or psychological human states...

...Margaret Atwood, in her book On Writers and Writing, speaks of "the inability to distinguish between the real and the imagined, or rather the attitude that what we consider real is also imagined: every life lived is also an inner life, a life created."¹ The 'catcher' the 'net' the 'sieve' the 'grid' speaks to all of these liminalities. It is inner and outer, the email spam, the intruding thoughts, the headless painful bliss of creation. It also could be none of these things. It could be paint, it could be whatever you would like it to be, it could be a single cord or vibration from a deep well of paint like a human iris earthquaking straight into your own human iris. You must decide whether to let it settle or explode."

¹ Atwood, Margaret. On Writers and Writing. London, Virago, 2003. p7.

Rebecca Nash is a writer and creative, based currently in Lyttelton.

Press release courtesy Jonathan Smart Gallery.