SPA_CE is pleased to present our second solo show with artist Iain Cheesman with his first painting show with the gallery.

I attended art school in the early 2000’s, majoring in the painting department. At that time art history was superimposed with art theory and as I remember ‘the sublime’ had a somewhat tardy image. It manipulated the pure natural image (landscape) to offer the viewer a sense of religious experience, awe and perhaps, the comfort from fear.

Nature did not get a say in the matter.

We have stuffed it up a lot and we are not completely honest about the reality of this.

At home, in Waiuku, we have finally removed all our sheep paddocks; all the wooden gates and fences have gone; we are on a path to our sublime.

With the stack of wooden gates, rails and posts we have built a viewing platform on our ridge.
From here we look out towards the Waikato river, across the “once upon a time” swamp.

The viewing platform is a classic folly and I guess that is in our DNA.

We are slowly re-planting the grassy paddocks; we have cut down the elderly pines. The changes will march ahead in chaos until nature takes control and we are left to just remove the weeds, as servants to the future.

But now we are dew eyed in local nurseries, wheelbarrows full with plants from Aotearoa. The promise of the multitude of greens, the flickering flowers: yellow from the Kowhai and Korokio, the red flowered Pohutakawa, and then the ripe red berries from the Puriri and the delicious looking yellow fruit from the Karaka.

We will have so much colour and as we retreat to our folly, to sit and look, the colour will appear before us, the distant farms and onion fields will blur and disappear.

Is it a dream or a nightmare to think that the natural world could/should/would dissolve our history? A reset that does not include us, a “catch 22” kind of sublime, the kind that has no individual view and no human point of view.

nature is sublime
and today nature is sublime
us now and today nature is sublime
it whips us now and today nature is sublime
sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime
we are sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime
treat nature like we are sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime
we treat nature like we are sublime it whips us now and today nature is sublime

Iain Cheesman
Jan 2025