Veronica Herber and Lang Ea held an intriguing artist talk at NORTHART.

Within a rigorous set of limitations, fields of heavy cotton rag paper, washi tape in various grades of black, and graphite powder, Veronica Herber explores infinite variables within the strictures of the grid. This demands from her a particular kind of attention, one that ceaselessly attends to the overlooked, the quickly passed-over, the smallest rupture or tremor in the rhythmic regularity of the grid. In turn, the viewer is called to this kind of attention when drawn into the web of these grids delicately held together by an oscillation between cut, torn, and sometimes layered edges of the black washi tape.

In some of these, soft smudges of graphite leak out from the density of the black tape, not shadows but rather soft emanations of quite different in character to the fragile edges of light that sometimes appear at their edges. The grids are always open-ended, and along with these subtle irregularities, suggest a continuum that pulsates with life like heartbeats, like breath. Although the meticulous placement of the tape beats out a rhythm, this space so carefully measured and staked out, is riven with difference, and it is here that torn and clean-cut edges, small shifts in scale send tremulous visual vibrations that run through the grids, threatening to collapse the perfect linear tension between black and white, order and chaos. It is within the mesmerising tension between the limitless expansion of the grid and limitless variability of the torn edges, the ridged layers and the ephemeral smudges that the essential vitality and instability of the relations between order and chaos show up to remind us that it is the dance between the known and the unknown, between form and matter, and life and death that weaves the world into being and allows it to thrive.

Veronica is represented by Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland.

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Lang Ea works across various media in an exhaustive effort to articulate the impact of war as it reverberates across the personal and universal psyche. Engaging with ideas such as intergenerational trauma and addressing the bitter evil of human indifference, her work is pointed and poignant, and rooted in her own family’s experience of the Cambodian war. Never afraid to blur mediums and categories of making, Lang always ensures a unique vision with multi-level audience experiences that are deep beyond the surface and pushed outside the studio and gallery walls. With this series of stainless steel works, Ea continues her contemplation of how the traumas of violence play out upon the individual psyche, and how these in turn echo at a species–level.

“Conflict begins with the idea and form of a water droplet -Fusion, unerring from its path and inseparable from its whole, representing life in harmonious and fluid relation, In Ea’s interpretation, however, the raindrop is knotted at the moment of its reunion with the whole, fixing it in a moment of uncomfortable separateness. What can be done with this conflict, within ourselves and our communities, in our neighbourhoods, and across borders? What are we striving towards, and why do we keep failing? These are some of the questions that drive Ea’s practices and that she hopes viewers encountering her work might also ask themselves.” Connie Brown - Sculpture on the Gulf 2022 Exhibition Catalogue