Extensum/Extensors

Extensum/Extensors

In this series of drawings, coloured marks have been made on creamy paper. Grey shaded areas in graphite appear like paragraphs of blurred text, or busy musical staves. Thick strokes of brown oil pastel read like furrows in newly turned soil, or long shadows. Swiftly-made, small lines in black and brown ink as well as pastel seem like upright figures, trees, fence posts or telegraph poles. Dashes in green felt pen read like lively grasses. Amassed brown marks look like little bodies of some kind. Sweeping parabolas made in ferrous oxide resonate outwards, their repeated forms move across the space of the page in successive waves. Speckled bars in rust jaunt across the paper. Though these drawings vary in size, they are all similar in scale, all slightly smaller than an A4 piece of copy paper. There is familiarity to the format, to the extent that each can be read like a page or document.

Drawing plays an important part in the process Pauline Rhodes’ undertakes when making sculptures. They are executed quickly and are used to generate ideas and reflect on particularity of site, space and materials. Here drawing is a form of rehearsal, a way of practicing configurations in space. This series was produced in preparation for Rhodes’ 1983 installation at the Govett-Brewster, Extensum/Extensor. In her drawings, the blank paper serves as a base level, ground or support with which to experiment with different masses of colour and texture. Lines and forms are placed, like sculptural elements in the space of an art gallery. Each of the marks Rhodes makes in her drawings correspond to materials she employs in her sculptures. In this case the heavy, brown, oil pastel stands in for rolls of rust-stained, heavy brown paper unfurling down walls and across floors. The green felt pen dashes become painted wooden rods, standing space at angles like thin, young trees. All of these elements stem from the artist’s careful observations of natural and built environments. Referenced here is the green of new growth, the ubiquity of found paper and most importantly, strata of iron-oxide in the geological environment of Banks Peninsula where Rhodes has lived and worked for more than five decades.

— Victoria Wynne-Jones, 2024