The boundaries between artforms are being increasingly blurred, challenged and transgressed.  Techniques and materials are being explored, and pushed to their known limits in order to cross boundaries and to discover new limits.  Generic forms are cross-referenced to create new forms.  Anything that works is put into practice.  Fabrics and fibres are made into three-dimensional forms.  Performance combines with objects, and printmaking techniques are applied to any surface that will receive them.

Sam Proctor prints digitally manipulated, photographic images onto large canvasses and makes them look like abstract and nonobjective paintings. There are references to landscape, but these are in no way narrative or descriptive.  Soft edges, exploratory lines, and free flowing shapes lead inevitably to meditative and spiritual meanings rather than to those which rely on representation or identification of a particular place. There are few visible geographic features.  Rather, shapes colours, textures and tones speak about the landscape without imitating its forms.  Resemblances are what Foucault would call 'sympathetic', rather than definitive. (1)  Sympathetic relationships are those which are freed from any direct sense of place in order to play through the compositions, so that a sense of harmonious movement becomes the main effect.

Proctor states that he has been influenced by painters such as Turner and Kandinsky.  There are also overtones of Rothko and Frankenthaller.  It is probably from these artists that he derives his interest in the play of light.  He entitles his exhibition Lambency in order to invoke the idea of light and colour playing on surfaces to illuminate gently and clearly, with no suggestion of the destructive qualities of flame or heat.  This idea seems to derive particularly from Kandinsky.

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky describes how human consciousness comes to conceive of light as having a friendly as well as an unfriendly side.  Flames may be dangerous, but light 'drives away the darkness, makes the day longer' and 'is essential to warmth'.  Light allows us to see everyday realities, 'that trees give shade, that horses run fast…and that dogs bite'.  But, as light becomes more deeply embedded into the human psyche, it allows physical objects to acquire 'inner meaning', and even 'spiritual harmony'.

'The eye', says Kandinsky, is 'strongly attracted by light, clear colours, and still more strongly attracted by those colours which are warm as well as clear'.  To a viewer with a 'sensitive soul' light and colour are deeply moving, and even produce a 'spiritual vibration'.(2)

It is this ability to move viewers and to convey a sense of sympathetic forms and spiritual vibration, that Sam Proctor strives for, and frequently achieves.  That he has an almost religious experience of the land is obvious from the titles of his works as well as the images.  Jade Tympanum refers to the fact that jade is sacred to an area in the South Island of New Zealand called 'the place of the greenstone waters'.  It refers to a listening to the land, and attending to its 'sympathetic' music.  A tympanum is a drum but also the arch over the entrance to a church.  The movement of light and colour in this work seems to bring together the ideas of music, landscape and religious experience.  As 'signifiers' these three elements 'play' against each other so that the signifified meanings extend and resonate against and beyond each other.

Similar responses are evoked by a work entitled Cathedral. The theme of light is explored here by the fact that the image is reminiscent of the light coming through a stained glass window. Dark lines play through a field of rich red and green colours. The idea of such windows in churches is to invite light from the heavens into the human sphere, and also to give humans an indication of the beauty of spiritual light. This work invites viewers to meditate on such light.

Those works based on the Australian landscape have an even stronger light than those done in New Zealand.  New Cadence, for example, is done in brilliant reds and blues.  These capture the strong colours of the red earth and the blue sky in the Australian landscape. There is no reference to a particular place, but a general, sympathetic evocation of landscape. The colours flow with and against each other, so that the cadence refers both to music and to falling water. Madrigal Drums is even more dynamic.  Here, the shapes and colours 'explode' from a set of centrally placed circular shapes.  The effect is that of a drum beat echoing through the landscape.

The religious experience of landscape is also invoked in those works that refer to sacred stones.  In Blue Omphalos 'clouds' of golden light emanate and flow upwards from a brilliant blue 'stone' at the base of the composition.   In Amber Leporine a golden orb floats in a field red and gold.

A few works, such as Sapphire Tactus are based on images which look more like cells under a microscope than landscape.  These works, especially when the colour is less intense than in the 'landscapes', are not as engaging as those that radiate with colour and light.  Overall, however, the exhibition presents an uplifting experience of enjoyment in, and reverence for, the landscape. It is not the type of work one would expect to come from photographs.  It has more in common with music and poetry than with representational imagery.  It is to be enjoyed rather than analysed or interpreted.

(1) Foucault, M. (1966). The Order of Things. London and New York: Toutledge. (p.26)
(2)  Kandinsky, W. (1914). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. (M.T.H. Sadler, Trans.). New York: Dover Publications. Inc. (pp.23-24).