Odelle Morshuis
Just Visiting
1 – 29 October 2022
Opening | Saturday 1 October 3 – 5 pm
Fox Galleries will present ‘Just Visiting’ a solo installation of Aotearoa-based artist Odelle Morshuis, renowned for her windswept figurative landscapes and silhouetted hand-cut steel sculptures.
Morshuis is a female artist pushing the contemporary narrative of figurative art. Her figurative landscapes are vulnerable and raw, in a poetic and interconnected dance of place; marking territory, recording history and in acknowledgment of the everywhen.
Although tangible, her figurative works have a temporariness, as if their stories are continuously interrupted, swaying into elastic windows of time, passers by, and lands visited. Passers by of just visiting will become part of the spatial narrative moving through to become part of her visiting experience.
Morshuis’ svelte and fraying outlines are always on the move: wading faceless figures that become energised by place. Her landscapes and backgrounds are also faceless, taking the shape of a sandpainting, ephemeral and alive. While her echoing paintings and sculptures remain grounded in the object, they are nonetheless a gentle reminder of impermanence.
We are all ‘just visiting’, forming overlapping durations with the now and the yonder. Just Visiting comes with a freedom of knowing you’re leaving, while temporarily in “search of blue sky”, as Morshuis puts it.
ODELLE MORSHUIS
is a New Zealand artist living and working in Bannockburn, Central Otago, New Zealand. Odelle’s current work uses depictions of the human figure in motion to explore concepts of time and change along with how we interact with our environment. Odelle’s method of working involves using a video camera to gather information on a subject, in which she then proceeds to project the video whilst drawing and painting simultaneously to create a feeling of time and movement within a frame. Odelle states, “My paintings create a narrative, every space has a story, a history of movement” reflected in the layers of drawing and painting that make up the rich surfaces of her paintings. Odelle’s work is in many national and international collections.
