Miranda Parkes is a self-described maximalist. This doesn't mean we see everything bar the kitchen sink, for she is a thoughtful artist - a canny operator even. But what it does mean is that she seeks in her work a directness of expression, handles a range of materials with mighty honesty, and tends to a palette that is exuberant and high key. The merrier was her Frances Hodgkins Fellowship show at the Hocken in 2017. This is the merriest. It is a re-iteration of that earlier exhibition but with additional work. For this is not the abstraction of pared back modernism - it is wonderfully democratic and happily inclusive. The merriest includes a range of beautifully sewn hand-dyed silks: the elegant diptych display table liners and antibody banner which here roams 8.2 metres along the south wall. It includes "the mash-ups" as Parkes calls them, a vibrant suite of two-sided paintings created out of papier-mâché. Upon these Parkes has unleashed her full range of mark-making skills, from line carefully masked and playfully poured, to colour fields densely layered and more transparent, and to other areas lightly angle-sprayed. Images from a book on Versailles are deftly manipulated. Even two of "baby-daddy's dropsheets" are stretched, retouched and made into paintings.
So life corrals art here and vice-versa - a process which is serious fun. The standing series of sculptures called inclusions embody this attitude. On spindly stands almost begging to topple, Parkes places paint wads dug out of trays and near-empty paint tins. Some of the skins drape. Some are thicker, stiff and look almost edible. One can but smile...JS
Press release courtesy Jonathan Smart Gallery.
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