Iteration 17

Rowan Thomson and Peter Derksen

Rowan Thomson is a Tāmaki Makaurau based artist whose practice moves across photography, video and installation. Their work investigates relationships between consciousness, identity, perception and embodiment. Throughout their practice, abstraction and ambiguity perform a struggle with binaries and a revolt against legibility.

Peter Derksen is an artist and archivist living and working in Tāmaki Makaurau. Within his sculptural installations matter shifts between states, muddying forms in contemplation of hyperconsumptive systems. Instability is embedded within these transformations, leaving room for molecular structures to become unfixed and unpredictable.

Over their years of study at Elam School of Fine Arts, Peter and Rowan’s practices have come to converge. Although working in different media and conceptual fields, both artists centre a search for metamorphosis and oscillation between real and imagined states. Iteration 17 is Rowan and Peter’s first collaboration, with works that aim to complicate identity and material embodiment through abstracting processes.

In Rowan’s photography, the gendered body seeks transmutation and transcendence. Captured as mirror selfies in silver mylar, the distorted reflections shift between fixation on the body’s form and its attempt to evade perception. Peter’s sculptural works echo these attempts at metamorphosis through experimental craft processes.

In transmutations (pewter), common pewter artefacts are destroyed, melted, and cast into new forms that enclose Rowan’s images. The mutating body hovers in a shadow world, bound by materially dense margins. These bulging, globular framing devices echo the mitosal destabilisation of Rowan’s self-portraits.

In the larger, unframed transmutations, the body is unconfined, expanding and multiplying – held only tentatively by cast pewter pins. A series of malformed pins extends out, suggestive of bodily forms.

In transmutations (glass), the light captured through Rowan’s self-interrogating lens is projected through a chunk of glass, cast from scavenged beer bottles. Bound by and manifested through materials, the fragmentary body rails against the borders of its physical form, trapped as light within a crystallised prism.

Collectively the works in iteration 17 speak to our transformative potential, realized through cross-practice collaboration, friendship and mutual support.