Catalogue essay: Barabara Strathdee @ Idiom Studio, September 2001
Lost in the undergrowth
It has been four years since Barbara Strathdee returned ‘for good’ to New Zealand after 30-plus years of splitting a life between Trieste, Italy and Wellington. And Strathdee’s recent work indicates a development from an observation of colonial power and its cultural impact, to an interest in the personal and social characterisation formed by and within a New Zealand landscape.

The section, the view, the garden, the city, and the bush: these are the familiar New Zealand partners to Strathdee’s three-dimensional houses in her latest series of works A House and The City. The houses, painted in primary colours on medium-density fibreboard are all built in the same crude, simplistic form and sit loudly on their vigorously painted landscapes.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same....

Strathdee’s works may echo the ‘ticky-tacky’ houses of Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 folk song, Little boxes, but Strathdee’s houses, unlike Reynolds’, do not form collectives, they stand isolated from others. Space and land frame these houses, and it is land, not other dwellings, which define the boundaries of the houses’ properties.

The houses, or in the case of A House and The Garden, a bush shelter made of sticks, seem precarious on their stands outside the painting frame. Their instability is emphasised by their slightness relative to their fraught, heavy landscapes. Sometimes a log may float around the painting as a crumb from past bush-clearing days. In A House and The Section, the log ventures out as a three dimensional memory of another time and space. The dwellings in Strathdee’s works provide a strange type of protection; a minimal, basic type of shelter, not necessarily suitable for their environment.

Strathdee’s dwellings are more than observations of simply designed New Zealand housing stock. The layered, foreboding landscapes surrounding these houses, are as dominant, if not more so, than the provisional, perched houses. With the exception of the lighter A House and The View, these works are generally uncomfortable. The rich, flowing brushstrokes of the landscape in A House and The City, adopt the appearance of flames ready to engulf the reproduction model house. Does the psyche of the pre-fab house and the isolation and containment of its residents contribute to a retarded rate of sophistication or social change? Once inside these dwellings, there’s no way out. One can sense a claustrophobia of living in these windowless boxes, which possess no real connection, save a visual one, to the powerful landscape behind. But who would want to venture out into the fraught landscapes on which the houses perch in?. It looks dangerous out there.

Is this the New Zealand suburban dream gone wrong? What introverted characters could possibly exist happily within these boxes for long?

Perhaps Strathdee sees New Zealanders’ habitats as an immigrant might, for she knows well the advantages and pitfalls of a more co-habitative environment. The typical multi-storey palazzo living of Italy provides daily interaction with one’s neighbours; a greater sense of community. Other people’s lives are literally designed into these apartment buildings. In New Zealand, Strathdee suggests, the suburban section, or view, or garden, or bush has come to dominate and mark territory for the detached house-dweller rather than any social network.

This awkward lack of integration between the constructed and primary worlds or cultures was present in Strathdee’s recent installation work at Stazione Topolo, an annual summer festival of international art in the mountain border-village between Italy and Slovenia. Strathdee has been involved in the Topolo festival since its early inception, exhibiting first there in 1994. In 2001, Strathdee placed fibreboard houses of the same form as those in A House and The City series on mats made of bright Pacific-styled fabrics around the old town in an installation entitled Picnic. These houses sat at odds with the easy charm and style of the village and surrounding landscape; their attempts to compete with the classic Italian architecture, pitiful. Especially significant this year was the fact that no other artists’ works in the festival were made in tangible media; all were works of video and/or sound. Strathdee comments that the curator’s increasing preference for work that is ‘non-visible’ may be to do with the expanding sense of intrusion that the residents feel the festival is having on their tiny town. Strathdee’s ultimate flouting of the brief for works of less material substance heightened the sense of displacement and isolation of her earnest houses.

Strathdee is planning an installation at the City Gallery, Wellington in September 2002 that will continue to draw on her comparative experiences of social cultures. This installation may attempt some resolution of the awkwardness awakened by A House and The City series; it will examine transcending situations. She is interested in how people address unwieldy social distances and bridge gaps; how ritual and practice can provide relief. Strathdee suggests that a dreaming, rather than analytical mindset is required, to overcome or dislocate from present circumstances.

In the meantime, A House and The City series examines an unintended, less comfortable dislocation between the dwelling and its environment. These works are significant for their presentation of the house not as an impostor on the landscape but as temporary shelter. It would seem that Strathdee’s houses and their imagined residents are less likely to remain bright and intact than their vigourous surrounds.


Sophie Jerram

September 2001