Sky Like a Raised Lid

A very abbreviated survey exhibition that sampled from the ministry of works by Marilynn Webb in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s keep, this offering in a small side gallery overflowed its wall area awkwardly and somewhat incoherently, the chronology shuffled, the contextualisation scanty—as if these were ancient artefacts about which little was known.

But individual artworks sang out strongly, and the centrepiece, Taste Before Eating, a limited edition portfolio of hand-coloured monotypes featuring polemical puddings and their recipes, first displayed at The Dowse Art Museum in 1982, tantalised from a low-slung, glass-topped, shiny white display case. If you suspended disbelief as you peered down into it, it could almost have passed for a banqueting table, albeit one of comic disquiet and droll foreboding.

Marilynn Webb is an artist for whom the politics of landscape are paramount, and they are expressed through solemn formalities and layered motifs. Her vaulting skies and dreamy landscapes make a religion of ecology, driving all nature into a benign and mothering net or web. Her gestural methods, hatched out of mid-twentieth-century expressionism and Tovey-generation art-school training that emphasised craft, have grown steadily over the decades to embrace