Meredith Collins: Finding Me, Finding You

Hamilton artist Meredith Collins paints what is beautiful, and she paints it for everybody.  Her canvases pulse with life - her life, her children's lives, the life of a Turkish girl from an antique postcard image.  The vitality shines out of the eyes of her subjects, and seeps from their skin that glows off the canvas when their eyes are hidden.  Collins' skill, harnessing this life force, derives from her philosophy on portraiture, namely that 'painting one person's portrait involves somehow painting every person.'  Though she admits that 'something one person finds beautiful, another can find repulsive or even offensive,' Collins' portraits and self-portraits are all hugely nuanced, layered, subtle, and unquestionably beautiful.

Looking at Collins' paintings, the viewer is struck first by their exposure, and then by their intimacy.  She remarks, 'I don't shout in my paintings.  We don't shout our intimacies, we keep them to ourselves.'  In the largest of the canvases, Collins lays in the centre, alert, awake, aware.  Her alternate selves flank her children, curled up beside her.  The painting conveys a 'quiet turbulence' - a controlled restlessness - which itself is echoed in recent developments in Collins' practice.  This series marks her first use of extensive grisaille underdrawing, an incredibly time consuming process but one that, she says, invests more time in her work, as well as more layers in paint that reflect the layers of meaning.

Time is also a theme, and more specifically, time coupled with tension.  In another self-portrait, Collins grips her bowed head with one hand; while a recently hatched butterfly suspends from the tip of her other finger.  The tension is heightened by the knowledge that were the scenario real, the figure would have maintained this pose for weeks.  Though perhaps unaware of the source of the tension, Collins urges viewer to engage nonetheless in an empathetic way that underscores her desire to 'contribute through painting what it is to be human.'  Collins' symbology is private, but resonated particularly with a New Zealand audience - native birds and ta moko root Collins' self-portraits here, but their meaning - and aesthetic appeal - is much broader.   By including her tattoo, for example, Collins locates this series specifically, while also challenging the viewers' conception of beauty, and boldly and bravely offering her own.

Though the majority of the works in this series are self-portraits and born of her own meditations, Collins aims overall to provoke others into their own thoughts.  Collins examines her own identity through these paintings; what she finds beautiful, what troubles her, and what completes her.  At once soft and strong, guileless and guarded, Collins' introspections invite the viewer to interrogate his or her own place: 'the essence of you is also the essence of me.'  Finding me, finding you.

Amy Stewart