Judy Millar’s first public art commission, created for SCAPE 8: New Intimacies.

IMAGE: Judy Millar, Call me Snake, 2015. Commissioned by SCAPE Public Art. Image courtesy of the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery. Photo by Hannah Watkinson.

About the artwork

Judy Millar is one of New Zealand’s foremost painters. Her work has garnered critical acclaim both locally and internationally, and she represented New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The central theme of her work is the relationship between the illusory and the physical, between our private inner world and our material existence, and the way the activity of painting can synthesise these contradictory ways of being. Millar is best known for her large-scale digitally printed and painted canvases, which loop and undulate through architectural spaces, exploring ideas of scale, and the compression of time and space. Her work for SCAPE 8: New Intimacies, Call me Snake, pushes these ideas beyond the enclosed architectural spaces she has previously worked with, into the Central Christchurch landscape.

The work is comprised of vibrant graphics of Millar’s looped paintings, which are adhered to five intersecting flat planes, and draws inspiration from the forms found in pop-up books. The colourful piece adds a dramatic and rhythmic counterpoint to the city’s current urban landscape —– a mix of flattened sites, construction zones and defiant buildings that have stood through the quakes. The work employs theatricality, playfulness and visual trickery, whereby the viewer is unsure about the work’s flatness or three-dimensionality; and it has been designed to offer a different perspective from each angle. The bright colours interrupt the grey of the work’s surrounds, and as buildings pop up around it, Call me Snake offers an optimistic provocation –: ‘imagine what could be here’.