Notes On: Ghost Picnics

Connie Brown on Georgia Arnold’s exhibition Arms that spin, Sanc Gallery, 23 July – 13 August 2022.

Georgia Arnold’s work is folkish and mystical, and pinned to the wall in a grid—as they were recently in Arms That Spin at Sanc—they look like a Tarot deck. Interpreting them, too, is a bit like interpreting fate. 

Arnold’s mark making technique turns drawing into conjuring. The scratches of her pencil seem incidentally to find the edges of shapes, forms and figures within the negative space of the page like water receding from a wax resist; and so each seems more like an apparition than something stable in space that she is observing and rendering carefully.

Not all apparitions are ghosts, and not all of them dwell in or visit from the underworld. Or is it just that the underworld is not always the dark and mean place it’s made out to be? Arnold’s vignettes—taken from the mirror’s reflection, moonless nights, the bottom of the garden, the other side of sleep—make a case for the other-underworld as a kind of quaking, watery carnival visited by a band of eccentric characters including goblins, cheshire cats and shadow selves who enjoy, among other things, going for swims and picnics.

Georgia Arnold, Arms that spin. Installation view, Sanc Gallery, Taāmaki Makaurau, August 2022

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