OPENING EVENT: 1 August, 5.30-7.30pm
PART OF FIRST THURSDAYS ON KARANGAHAPE RD

Melanie Roger Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Layla Rudneva-Mackay - her first solo exhibition with the gallery.

     In school we are taught how the eye works with diagrams that show light rays coming in, converging at a point, and then spreading out again onto the back of the eye so we can make a retinal image in our brains. This privileges a certain type of ocularity, one based on an empirically observable material world, and what is known about the eye scientifically. But what of other ways of seeing, other phenomena, other sciences? 

      What might a druidess say about seeing and what can be observed? Children can see auras and other spiritual phenomena, but then, with age, our synapses short-change us, and most of us lose the ability for the most part. But it is still there, a latent ability to look past it. This facility to see energies, and forms from non-physical dimensions can be severed. 

      When connections re-appear, a miracle, a spring after a long, deathly winter, life shows itself. It blooms, sprouting tendrils, its images like those of galaxy creation produced by space research programmes; or by psychedelic experience crashing about in ‘expanded consciousness’. As in prayer, we are making something form, and it is never clearer that we are not separate objects.

      The body is part of everything – it is visionary. Looking past it, a landscape is a way in, a route, a portal into a space of thought and feeling, intuition and knowing. Finding ways to articulate this is a task of painting, which reaches into this ocular surplus, this excess of information. 

      Painting’s eye is not a camera in the school-science diagram sense. Camera as a word used to pertain to an arched or vaulted room, chamber, building. Or a small chamber, or cavity in a mechanism, a part of the body, a shell. It can be a matter of light drawing. Drawing light in. Drawing it lightly. Draw it out. Draw it on. Look lightly. Hold lightly.

      Shimmer space – if you focus it stops. Describing what is ‘seen’ by the ‘eye’ that floats inside and outside, on the surface and ground and between, is to approximate. The connection is very light, but language is not. It is clunky and solid and definite. For the see-er, the seer, communicating in words is not the first language. A way of understanding that is too light in the body. A weightless eye.

     Light drawing. Drawing light. Landscape comes from the land when painting. Circling back to histories, stories settle on my skin. Heavy and light, distant and close. Not the type of wordy studied knowing. 

     It sidles up close, sits in my edges. Shimmers ever so lightly. I feel its presence. I see it in the corner of my eyes. I long, but I do not turn to look. Facing it straight on, it goes. I carry too much world chatter.

     I look on the white worded page next to me. There is a praying mantis doing its slow jiggly. I am swinging in the breeze, walk away from me. I look back and it is gone. When I wasn’t looking, it seemed to have moved fast.

     Dropping my daughter at school across the park. Watching the looping flight paths of the welcome swallows. Rhythmic shapes, circular and unpredictable. Swooping repeats, never the same and seemingly never-ending.

     Remembering way back to a time spent here with her older cousin. What has changed in me. Threading the non-visible. Stretching through space and time stitching us together. 

- Gwynneth Porter & Layla Rudneva-Mackay, 2024

Layla Rudneva-Mackay graduated with an MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2006. She has exhibited throughout Aotearoa in public and private galleries as well as artist run spaces since 1998. She has works in major public and private collections throughout Australasia.