Southard Reid is proud to present Mind Fields, the frst exhibition in the United Kingdom of Vivian Lynn (b. Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 1931, d. Wellington, 2018).
Lynn worked both in and outside the conventional structures of the art establishment. She sought to construct and record an alternative tradition for art, one that had deep roots but which she re-worked so that its symbols were no longer inimical to women, 'our bodies are mediated by cultural codes, as are our daily lives. My interest is in dislocating and transgressing these codes in a way that makes them tangible. The diferent bodies, the biological, imaginary, socio-economic, political and mythic, that form a corporeal ground of intelligence and desire, are alluded to in my work’. She interwove a diverse range of media: sculpture, installation, collage, painting, photography, drawing, print and book- making, incorporating references to history, culture, politics, society, technology, and chemical, biological and medical processes.
Mind Fields includes includes connected series of work from 1984 and 2007, in which Lynn examined the workings of the mind and the body, as she herself experienced its failings, and their relation to external reality and deep history. Utilising a formal fuidity between drawing, painting and layered use of materials, these works reveal her recognition of the co-existence of and interdependency between interior and exterior worlds. The surfaces of her works register the interplay of human, animal, and vegetal.
Lynn’s Mind Field series, completed in 2007, combine a complex array of materials. Painted Rorschach cut-outs foat over rectilinear planes of aluminium and wrinkled paper treated to resemble a metallic yet bloodied skin. These works are a clear articulation of the materiality which is a key feature of Lynn’s practice. With titles such as Mind feld: framework to integrate things seen across diferent felds I and Mind feld: a hair strand contemplates the order, these signal Lynn’s deepest intention, which is to de- and reconstruct meanings through the thoughtful and skilled deployment of forms and materials. At once female genitalia and muscled torsos, butterfies and brains, her foating signs mirror her eforts to dismantle the hierarchies of what she calls the ‘either/or’.
These works are conceived either in relation to the vestigial traces of a modernist grid or as natural forms transitioning into human constructions. They evidence two nodes in a sixty-year practice that saw the artist recode her inherited intellectual frameworks and modernist training to posit a critical vocabulary that brought together abstraction and fguration, landscape and the body, materials and imagery.
The large-scale drawings Wounded Garden and Asherim II from 1984 present powerful feminine preserves that are at once intimate and vertiginous, binding together nature and culture, interior and exterior, to demonstrate the artist’s sense of being in the world.
Our bodies are mediated by cultural codes, as are our daily lives. My interest is in dislocating and transgressing these codes in a way that makes them tangible. The diferent bodies, the biological, imaginary, socio-economic, political and mythic, that form a corporeal ground of intelligence and desire, are alluded to in my work.
Lynn’s works Spin, 1995–7 and Caryatid, 1986 are included in the Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, 1 April - 9 May 2021. Her retrospective was at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington (2008). Lynn’s works have been widely exhibited and acquired by institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand including Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand; Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland; Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, as well as Smithsonian Institute, Washington; Honolulu State Foundation and Honolulu Art Academy, Hawaii, amongst others.

Opening :
Saturday 5 September, 10 - 6pm

mpefm UNITED KINGDOM art press release