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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Saskia Leek’s series of nine paintings collectively titled ‘Underwood’ was commissioned for an issue of the literary and arts journal Landfall that was based on the theme of shelter. Leek’s works in this series depict notions of shelter as dwellings set within landscapes, which often include animals, or as cosy domestic interiors. They can be viewed as a group connected by a loose narrative flow, but each work also stands alone and contains its own possibilities.
The diminutive size of Leek’s paintings requires close viewing and a commitment to lean in and become involved with the scene. They are intimate but open sets that charm the viewer and invite us to engage with them imaginatively. These two works, which together suggest an exterior and interior view of the same house, are typically fey and somewhat frozen — the notes of the birdsong are like a frame from a stop-motion animation — as if their subjects are under some kind of spell. At the very least their sugary representations of the commonplace — the crackling fire, the fluffy white pet under a pink blanket — are otherworldly enchantments. Perhaps, with these simple vignettes, Leek is suggesting that the imagination itself can be a place of shelter.
Leek, who says she ‘really likes art that doesn’t look like art’,1 sources ideas from her discoveries of old paintings, prints and photographs in second-hand shops. She combines elements of these found images with her own experiences and memories of places and events to create scenes reminiscent of storybook illustration. Leek’s ongoing interest in the odd and overlooked in visual representation is also evident in her deliberately awkward treatment of perspective and her choice of subjects more usually associated with amateur or naïve painting. Yet, as curator Justin Paton has noted, her works achieve ‘a rare balance of the wry and the heartfelt, as if the artist is smiling at the shop-worn pathos of her subjects while paying unembarrassed homage to the sentiments they provoke — the cute, the sentimental, the nice’.2
Charlotte Huddleston
1 Saskia Leek, quoted in Virginia Were, ‘Ghost world’, Art News New Zealand, vol. 23, no. 1, Autumn 2003, p. 42.
2 Justin Paton, ‘Charmed’, in Justin Paton and Saskia Leek, Ghost painting, Saskia Leek, 24 June–10 September, exhibition catalogue, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2000, unpaginated.