For me, as an artist, there were fewer and fewer opportunities to exhibit in the city now almost bereft of dealer galleries and the rest of the country tiring of the images coming out of Christchurch through the MSM. Days started to feel the same and offered up few answers to everyday issues. Groundhog Day presented itself. This series of works is built around the notion of daily sameness but looks to enthusiasm for change. The painting of the same image repeatedly was therapeutic and in a funny way provided stability in a year that offered none in other quarters. Living in a house that required earthquake repairs, waiting in an invisible line of bureaucracy for decisions to be made for which, day by day, you had lesser control over the outcome, was debilitating for all. Naming the coin operated horse ‘Silver’ enabled some degree of gilding the event. Making the cost of the ride 2/- [two shillings] (even though NZ had been decimal since 1967) was recognition of the Mayor of the day (Bob Parker), so the rides were ‘to bob’ or two shillings using Kiwi slang.

The work illustrated (below) is 30 Pieces of silver. The major piece in the series it has references to dwellings demolished in the Red Zone though numbering on the left hand edge, each number a real house/dwelling number. The numbers chosen, using a numerology counting sequence, number 1 to 30 without a duplicate number. The concept around the 30 pieces of Silver references the biblical with the payouts made by the Crown for damaged land.

Campbell Live filmed the works and interviewed me on the my state of mind after the earthquakes in a segment they titles The Recurring Horse Theme that you might still find on the internet.

These works may get out for exhibition this year when I show with Philip Trusstum and Eon Stevens at Chambers Gallery.

From Christchurch Art Seen [April 2020]

I can’t think of a much more appropriate title than The Carnival is Over as New Zealand leaves Level 4 later tonight. Whether you have enjoyed your time in your bubble, or barely made it through, we can all be proud of doing our bit and surviving the last 33 days.

Todays art bite features an image by local artist David Woodings, who has been working on a suite of soft pastel on paper works.

Woodings last solo show in Christchurch was the Merrily go around exhibition at Chambers Gallery in 2018, featuring large oil on canvas photorealist carousel-based imagery. Some of you will also remember his Somme/Silk Road series of WW1 silk card based imagery which formed part of commemorative works for family who fought on the Somme in WW1. He exhibited these at Chambers Gallery with Philip Trusttum and Eion Stevens as part of a group show in 2019.

Woodings has returned to a familiar genre of large-scale chalk pastel on paper with his new body of work The carnival is over, having used this medium on many occasions throughout his career. He first exhibited as one of Four photo realists in 1978 at the Peter Webb Gallery in Auckland and has maintained this photorealist painting style throughout that career, his subject matter underpinned by a social history narrative of storytelling.

While continuing to use familiar imagery The carnival is over suite of works maintain his legacy of storytelling, used here as an analogy for the Anthropocene. This has been a key interest for the artist since his summer stays at Cape Evans in Antarctica in the late 1980s. Here, Woodings compiling a digital inventory of the material in the heritage huts, and spent time with the Greenpeace team of scientists who maintained a base at the Cape during those years.

The Carnival is over: Dodgems 2. Chalk pastel on paper 95 x 140cm

Each pertains, in an allegorical sense, to the notion that carousels function in the same way as the political process where riders wait until everyone has boarded and the music plays before the ‘animals’ begin to circle. The carousel, as a circular ride, results in the ‘riders’ not knowing whether they are leading, following, in the front or the back of any perceived ‘race’, which can stop at any time, the ‘rider’s replaced with any other participant in the dance.

Each work has an allegorical set of references for each ‘party’ and features providing a narrative. Generally, each carousel animal is pointing in the political affiliation direction [left or right leaning] of the selected image. The animals are named (although not in each instance) for their affiliation and have specialised characteristics (detailed below) to provide further narrative. Each is titled to further attribute a reference to the imagery.

The empty vessel has the loudest sound (illustrated here) is an image chosen to represent the New Zealand First politician Winston Peters. Allegorical features include the inclusion of a mining reference to ‘PR’ [Pike River 29’], the National Party-coloured sash cloth, the carved Ruru [wise old owl’) and the inclusion of a ‘Gold Card discount’. There is also a TV image of a racehorse which connects to the Ministry of Racing.

Other works in the suite are; The fourth of July, Only the inescapable is possible, Orewa Carnival, Edendale Primary School Gala September 2017.

Based on the historical ‘silk cards’ of WW1 these 12 images would not have been actual cards and hold a more subversive message about those who for a variety of reasons chose not to serve their country during the WW1 campaign.

Each card, apart from Love to my Conchie Boy which approaches the issue of conscientious objection directly, is word or rhyme based and utilises the stitched embroidery of original cards whilst also accentuating colour, as Cowardy cowardy custard where the lettering is custard yellow, as is the yellow stitching of Yellow belly, the lettering for Chicken shit the green and white of foul droppings and in Pussy the flesh pink also includes a labia shape within the underline stitching. In other cards in the series Lily livered floats on a card of lilies and both Chicken shit and Pigeon hearted feature bird characters, in the case of Pigeon hearted, the New Zealand Kereru. The White feather card mirrors the standard design for a New Zealand imaged silk card of WW1 era except that the traditional silver fern is replaced by a similarly shaped white feather. To my dear coward takes on an image of revision with a replacement term ‘glued’ over the original stitching to reflect the cards ‘new’ sentiment. Gutless takes the form of a rebus puzzle.

September 2016 – February 2017

New Zealand National Army Museum

Waiouru

This exhibition– through my embroidery styled photorealist painted silk cards, based on those crafted by women in France and Belgium during WW1 – traces the changing relationship with family by an unnamed soldier fighting on the Somme in 1916. Paintings of imaginary and real cards forwarded to his Father, Mother, Sister and girlfriend illustrate place, time and sentiment during one of World War One’s bloodiest battles. Dedicated to his grandfathers who both fought and were wounded on the Somme, the works are an intimate recording of messages received at distance from the front, and a poignant reminder of relationships strained by the nature of the messages.

After exhibition at Artspost in Hamilton in April/May 2016, the 50 works in the show are now scheduled for exhibition at the National Army Museum in Waiouru from September 2016 to February 2017.

I am grateful for the loan by the Waikato Museum and Barry Hopkins of the ‘Mother’s suite’ to complete the narrative of the show.

Altered state

I first saw images of David Woodings’ eloquent Still Lives oils via the artist’s twitter feed during 2013. There’s nothing strange about that; the social media platform is the portal through which I and many others access an increasing percentage of our news and views, and visual and conceptual information. But seeing these images in the context of a live stream of information had an impact that I noticed as being peculiarly moving. But I wasn’t, at the time, sure why.

The images, which I have yet to see as ‘oil on wood panel’ objects, arrived via twitter’s rich and rapid data feed shortly after I had been in Christchurch for the first time since the earthquakes. I had been shaken by what I’d seen there. It was more than two years after the February 2011 quake and I hadn’t known what to expect. But the scale of emptiness and undoneness – and the depth of its impact on residents by then keen to talk about a numbing and seemingly endless ‘snail’s pace’ aftermath – stunned me. It was a million miles away from the positive renewal stories national media had been serving up.

Certainly the live twitter feed of what was happening in Canterbury had long since stopped – or maybe it was just that I’d long since stopped noticing it?  And then these images popped up, from post-quake Christchurch, carrying an unmistakable sense of fragility, beauty, survival. And a somehow vocal, charged sense of silence.

After the shaking stops brings together examples from three suites of work, each made in response to the earthquakes. In each the artist uses his characteristic interest in noticing things that we might not pause to see. In our everyday busy-ness these details are banal, extraneous. There is a sense, in the way the artist has chosen to select, compose and construct theses images, of tangible things which we now know are delible – able to be deleted. And maybe that is what an earthquake reinforces more than anything, that every tangible thing is, in fact, temporary. Deletable.

And so, from the fragments of broken family treasures, with their beauty and the poignancy of their loss so tenderly captured in Still Lives, to the inoperable slot-machine horse ‘Silver’ in Winners/Losers, Woodings’ shows how skilled he has become at noticing silence, stillness, loss and absence – as a way of drawing our attention to the things these qualities stand in for or replace. While we are more likely to notice these other qualities – noise, action, winning and presence –, Woodings’ highly selective photo-realist gaze allows us to catch a glimpse of the moment, the space, that sits between these two sets of ideas.

These images don’t strike me as being about the things they portray. Rather, maybe it’s this flicker of what comes before and after the images Woodings presents us with that’s at the heart of what is distinctive about these works. This transient idea of what happens between something being here, the realisation that it was always deletable, and the knowledge of what it is for it to have passed, be out of order or lost, beyond usefulness.

The reality of twitter is that every single thing is implicitly delible – created to be deleted. The transience of any one story, image, statement or point of view – and its rapid replacement with others – is part of its life force. I realise now why seeing Woodings Still Lives paintings in this temporary space was moving in that particular and peculiar way. In these haunting images Woodings captures this idea of transience; he names it in a way that makes us notice it.

And that is indelible.

Tim Walker

January 2014

Artists have responded to the shocking phenomena of the Christchurch earthquake/s in their work and practice in a number of diverse ways, but invariably and predictably those ways usually involve a tone that is solemn, grave, perhaps sad, maybe heartening and moving with a certain uplifting and elevating demeanour. It’s an earthquake after all and people in need require hope and faith and healing. They require a reason to feel optimistic, to be supported in their grief, grounded and given images that can carry them through the taxing times ahead as they look to the future. What they don’t need is bureaucratic bungling, endless excuses for little being done and PR spin to cover ineptitude and incompetence.

One Christchurch artist who has been brave enough to confront the darker side which deals with those latter troubling issues is David Woodings. His current exhibition at Hamilton’s Artspost, After the Shaking, gathers together three separate but thematically linked series of works that examines, without rose-tinted glasses, the reality of living in limbo for nearly four years who, like many others, is continuing to wait for something to be done and who personally still has to wash his dishes in a bucket and feel the winter draft through cracks and holes in the wall of his house. At a certain point in the waiting, the hope and faith runs out and frustration and scepticism take hold. This is the background and context to the works in the show which are unashamedly political and satirical.

Woodings uses a hyperrealist mode (with a nod toward Populuxe) and this method – realism on steroids – suits his subject perfectly. The three larger works in the exhibition belong to the first series, painted between 2011 – 2013 entitled, Out of Order. These use the trope of the coin operated arcade machine which Woodings has worked on before to explore a variety of social issues. Here the slot machine one finds in arcades in every mall in the country becomes a symbol and means to comment on the Christchurch predicament. The “out of order” title refers literally to those notices pinned periodically to the child’s amusement machine when it has broken down. At another level in the earthquake context, they refer to the failure of the powers that be to implement speedy recuperation processes and expedite plans for the restoration and improvement of life and wellbeing in the city. They refer to everything that has been wrong and incompetent and even corrupt in the handling, management and administration of the recovery.

The three machines Woodings has chosen to place in the literal setting of post-quake ruins are emergencies services represented by a helicopter, fire engine and bulldozer, symbolically referencing the failure of services, over nearly four years, to handle logistical and practical problems adequately and quickly. Out of Order #3, for Bob, is obviously a direct reference to former mayor, Bob Parker, now Sir Bob. The inclusion of the “Bob the Builder” character standing on the machine, the “we can do it” man, becomes ironic in so many ways. Both the helicopter and fire engine in Out of Order #1 and #2 are toys presented in mint immaculate condition, blown up to life size, brightly coloured and smoothly finished like the glassy surface of a scooped ice-cream, like something straight out of Disney.

This sets up a sardonic frisson between toy and the actual ruins in which they are positioned, acting as metaphor for the disjunction between reality and fantasy, promise and failure to deliver, the gap between the adult world and the pretend adult world where one begins to slip onto the other. The toy becomes a symbol, in context, of a feigned simulation, speaking of all that which is fake and counterfeit. Not only are things out of order, but what is suggested here also is that the “order” was a fabrication in the first instance.

That all of this is presented in super realist fashion where surfaces gleam and look more real than real, simply adds to the bizarre contradictions that present a miss-match between political huff and puff and actuality as seen on the ground.

In 2012 with still nothing happening to rectify on-going appalling living conditions for the artist personally and for many others in the city, Woodings decided, as a way of managing as a fulltime artist under these conditions, to paint the same subject over repeatedly in a kind of manic Groundhog Day scenario with the intention of not stopping until something did change. It resulted in thirty paintings all of which depict the same arcade slot machine, a silver horse where each is presented in identical detail. The whole suite of paintings is called 30 Pieces of Silver with all the obvious connotations associated with that phrase, plus several other layers of meaning; the silver horse a mocking reference to the Lone Ranger’s horse where no one comes to the rescue in time while the price for the ride, two shillings, (deliberately altered from the usual 50 cents) alludes to the colloquial term for that amount – two bob – another reference to the lead actor in the muddled drama in which no silver lining was or is apparent.

In a similar but smaller suite of paintings that treat the silver horse in the same fashion, entitled, One for You and Two for Me, Woodings alludes in the title to the 1958 film Tom Thumb in which the villains divide up the loot using the same devious formula. The artist has in mind a similar iniquitous modus operandi employed by the government in deciding how to value land they acquired after the quake.

The show is completed with a third set of works, Still Lives, which take as their subject individual items of antique and historic value, broken ceramic pieces and glassware, objects of singularity which can never be repaired or replaced and setting them against/inside the backdrop of a wine box. The poignancy of the arrangement (broken treasures collected in boxes) becomes apparent when one learns that alcohol consumption rose sharply in the city not only immediately after the earthquake but in the subsequent years as the toll of events and their repercussions mounted, compounded by a sorry tale of bureaucratic mendacity.

This is the first time Woodings has been able to hang all three series of works together (in Christchurch approximately a dozen dealer galleries that once operated no longer exist) and their complementary nature adds immensely to viewer enjoyment where photorealism meets surrealism in a caustic disclosure of political narration.

Peter Dornauf

Read more: http://eyecontactsite.com/2014/01/woodings-on-the-christchchurch-earthquake#ixzz2r5G5er7o
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial

Continuing to use landscape details from my neighbourhood to detail the earthquakes of 2010/2011, the background of Out of order #3 is the Carnegie Library Building from the suburb of Woolston. Implanted into the scene (in similar fashion to the rescue helicopter in Out of order #1 and the fire brigade in Out of order #2) is an earth mover driven by Bob the Builder.

The use of an image connected to Bob [Mayor Bob Parker] was central to the works in 2011 when first considered, but with the Mayor signalling his departure from office at the 2013 elections it seemed important to finish this work prior to that happening. So, in celebration of the face of many of the difficult times during the past 3 years since the earthquakes I give you Out of order #3 (for Bob).

Visions of Utopia August 10 – September 5 2010

‘….a number of the participating artists in ‘Visions of Utopia’ also draw attention to the folly of human behaviour in the search for complete and absolute contentment. The larger-than-life colour and environment of the shopping mall and game arcade in David Woodings ‘Everybody’s going somewhere just as fast as they can ride’, is a visual, sensory experience. The artist celebrates the detail, colour, shapes and seductive forms of the irresistible objects and items that make up this world of play and amusement. If it appears to be ‘too good to be true’ it is so for a reason. Woodings’ arcade belongs to a world that ultimately defeats and denies the reality of all of its promises.

In shaping and revealing something of the sensory attraction and superficial nature of such an experience, Woodings partakes in an act common to all artists. He responds to, and interprets, the world around him, asserting his domain over it, giving vision to an idea that makes commentary and often judgement upon his environment. In the conception and making of his work, Woodings’ behaviour is utopian, as he asserts his aesthetic and philosophical authority as artist over his painting.

Accordingly, ‘Visions of Utopia’ features the work of individuals whose practice, in the making and resolution of images, is an aesthetic and philosophical journey for an idea or archetype.

Dr. Warren Feeney

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