“This simultaneous forwards and backwards temporality of Heaphy’s work continues into the present. The image content seems both nostalgic and timeless, the palettes historically informed and attuned to contemporary visual culture. The First Days in a Strange New Land presents a striking selection of iconographic images, sumptuous colour selections, and deft paint handling.”
Chris Heaphy has been active as an artist for more than three decades. During that time, he has created a significant body of highly engaging artwork. Visually and conceptually nuanced, his work has examined themes of time, place, and memory. These themes have remained consistent while the artist has moved through several different approaches to image-making.
More recently, Heaphy’s paintings have been comparatively restrained, employing single motifs set amongst visually striking colour fields. The works presented in The First Days in a Strange New Land operate in this more recent pared-back mode. Heaphy employs birds, feathers, vessels, and silhouetted heads in profile as the primary subject matter for these paintings, conjuring a range of associations with local and universal themes, including life, death, the environment, and post-colonial experience.
