Before Me | Charrette van Eekelen
Van Eekelen contemplates her relationship to local landscapes through materiality and form and considers its inhabitants, past and present.
The cottage is punctuated by a powerful suite of small scale, texture rich paintings. These perform like stations around the walls and work as series. Each, a nocturnal meditation distilling a quiet reverence and introspection one can feel in the safety of a familiar landscape, transformed by night.
The central work for Before Me is a large scale mixed media textile painting, made from carefully curated fabrics and textures. This work is a study of Margaret Stoddart’s 1908 watercolour painting, Bushfire at Paraparaumu.
‘I use textiles, knitting, embroidery and paint to explore materiality, memory and a sense of home. In this work, I have been looking at the landscape around me through my own experience, while also imagining what Margaret might have
seen from this place before me. Our lives are separated by time, circumstance and experience, yet there is something familiar in the act of looking. She looked at what was before her; I look at what is before me. Across time, we are not so
different,’ says Charrette.
Before Me opens Saturday October the 3rd at 4pm at Stoddart Cottage.