Review: My Head on your Heart
Nina Seja is a writer and researcher based in Auckland.
Review supported by Creative New Zealand funding.
In Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum is a macabre encounter with the physiology of the human body, disease, and mysterious ailments. The museum of medical history depicts preserved specimens, suspended in jars of formaldehyde. This frozen state of animation captures not only the physical reminiscences of lives (however brief) once lived, but also the shadow of vitality that these specimens once had – or were promised. In Rome, the Museum and Crypt of the Capuchin Friars serves a similar purpose, with the addition of an infused Catholicism permeating the crypt. The bones and mummified remains of Capuchin friars create starbursts and kaleidoscopes, vignettes that remind the viewer of one’s mortality.
Install Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland 2020
I’m reminded of these two displays and the weight of existence, its fleeting tendencies, and the casings it leaves behind with Roberta Thornley’s latest exhibition, My Head on Your Heart. The series consists of six photographs of balloons in various states and colours, though largely in primary tones. There’s an element of playfulness to the works, the disposable goods elevated to objects of contemplation. Balloons are automatically imbued with high-spirited connotations – moments of celebration, short-lived childhood toys, signs that say: Good one. You did it. In one, Red Balloon and Knotted String, a cluster of six red balloons are like plump grapes, a tangle of strings impossibly knotting them together.
But in the series, levity is the exception. The stark black backdrops and furred velvet sheen on which some of the balloons rest give pause to the forced messages of joy. In Green and Blue Balloons, there’s the pair of nesting balloons. A baby blue touching a larger green one is symbiotic – though different, they seem matched, as if two parts of a union: mother and child; yin and yang. In Pink Balloon and Floss, a flesh-toned balloon hangs down from a single piece of string. The bulb-like droplet, a sac of air, is ripe with potential. The rim is like a belly button, more skin than plastic.
Moving through the series, the last two arrive at decay quickly. In Silver Balloon, a balloon in pallid grey reclines against the black velvet, its skin puckering on its rapid decline. We know in balloon terms how fast this comes, how almost overnight it deflates into a sorry state. The dash of optimism is all but gone and one can almost hear the hiss as the air slowly escapes. In the last, Two Black Balloons, the rot sinks into the velvet. Black balloons against black velvet, impressive in their density. This photograph could well be suited to the Mütter Museum: an appendage needing scientific scrawls to both identify and create distance to just what it is in front of you.
To some degree, this is given in Thornley’s petite accompanying text, also called My Head on Your Heart. Wisp-thin pink pages extend Thornley’s considerations of the balloon and the body and their meeting points. It’s familial too, weaving through stories of the photographer’s grandmother, and mother, and then her own daughter. Four generations unified by air. Each excerpt calls up the preciousness of air, enabling human life to go on:
Of the matriarch: “My grandmother’s lungs were damaged for good by the TB. As long as I knew her she always struggled to keep her breath. When she spoke it was as though her voice and breath were passing through her body, not out of it.”
Of the mother: “Mum’s waiting to get an angioplasty procedure. I picture a tiny balloon filling her arteries. I imagine the surgeon sitting bent over with pursed lips, trying to blow it up. Have you ever tried blowing up a water balloon? They are small and difficult and your lungs feel like they will burst and your cheeks will turn to stone before you can finish. Whose breath will be in my mother’s veins?”
Of the photographer herself: “I dislike the feeling of my own heart beating. It makes me uncomfortable, like there isn’t enough space in my chest and in that moment breathing seems more important than a beating heart.”
And of the photographer’s daughter: “A balloon burst in front of our new born baby in the hospital. She was only a few hours old. The room wasn’t big enough to dilute the noise. It was so close that something inside me burst with it.”
This precarious oxygenated dance is shown to be all the more at risk when lungs are scarred and arteries are narrowed. The razor’s edge between the breath and its absence can be seen in Thornley’s lament: “If only the breath in a balloon could be gifted back to a lost one. I always feel sad seeing a balloon floating away in the sky.”
Though balloons typically convey lightness, they are, in Thornley’s work, weighty – more solid markers than flimsy moments of fancy. As is in other series by the photographer, the density is likewise present in the Rembrandt-like interplay of light and darkness. These echoes can be seen in 2009’s Couple in which two white stacks of chairs glow in the darkness and the 2012 series I Will Meet You There, which depicts rural youth at a moment of metamorphosis, reflected by the moody half-light.
The very nature of breath is transitory: gasps, yawns, and the steady stream of inward and outward movement. But in Thornley’s photographs, she succeeds in pinning breath down, containing it in a vessel also known itself to be temporary, if not immaterial.
Roberta Thornley is an award-winning artist and photographer.
Her cultural heritage, early and ongoing enchantment with photography and involvement in sport have given her a way of viewing the world that influences all aspects of her work. They form the foundation for her storytelling in various mediums and across genres.
Roberta Thornley was born in Auckland. She received a prime minister’s sports scholarship to attend the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. There she studied sculpture, painting and photography. She graduated in 2008.
She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in both New Zealand and Australia and her work is held in private and public collections throughout New Zealand and internationally. She has won a number of prizes including the inaugural Auckland Festival of Photography annual commission, the Art50 trust funding grant and the Tylee Cottage artist residency, where she developed a body of work about a Whanganui teenage gymnast Millie recovering from injury at her seaside home in Castlecliff. In 2017 she was awarded the Marti Friedlander Prize for photography from the Arts Foundation.
Roberta has had a life-long interest in photography and an ongoing interest in the work of others. Her approach has been influenced by her relationships, a cultural heritage and education where the aesthetic experience was inherent and her life lived in sport.
In her practice she crosses genres and approaches – landscape, portraiture, and still life; from the staged to the incidental. She explores transformation and transition; states of change as well as evolution and development.
Her process is playful, exploring the shape and materiality of her subjects, building relationships, navigating landscapes. Yet play pauses when she takes a photograph and she is acutely aware of, and interested in, exploring this dialogue between play and the photographic act when she engages with her subjects.
Her work hovers at the leaping off point between still and moving image and she delicately occupies herself with the tension between narrative, time and the photographic image.
Roberta is working on a photobook that chronicles her time spent in Rwanda in 2015. She has a multidisciplinary research interest in aesthetics and is currently developing new commercial work. She lives in the Waikato with her 4-year-old daughter and partner.
Born 1985
Auckland, New Zealand
Education
BFA Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University 2007
Solo Exhibitions
Selected Works
Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2023
Through the Nautical Twilight
Laree Payne Gallery, Hamilton New Zealand, 2022
My Head on your Heart
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2020
Maternity Leave March 2018 — March 2020
Survey show: Round and Round
Roberta Thornley works to date. The Pah Homestead, Auckland, New Zealand, 2018
A Serious Girl
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2018
A Serious Girl
Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui New Zealand, 2017
Round and Round
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2015
O.E Travel 2014 — 2015
History in the Taking:Forty Years of PhotoForum
City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2015
I will meet you there
Tim Melville Gallery, Melbourne Art Fair, Australia, 2012
Anthem
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2011
Auckland Festival of Photography commission
Aotea Centre, Auckland New Zealand, 2011
Tomorrow
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2010
Spell
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland 2010
Spell
Stills Gallery, Sydney Australia, 2010
Idle
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2009
Pine
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2008
Selected Group Exhibitions
Peakes and Troughs
Conor Clark and Friends — Jonathan Smart Gallery 2023
Autonomous Bodies
The national portrait Gallery 16 September — 11 November 2021
On with the Show
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2020
Turn of a Century
Sarjeant Gallery 7 Sep 2019 — 9 Feb 2020
125: Celebrating women from the collection
Sarjeant Gallery Sep 15 — 17 Feb 2019
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2018
Aotearoa in Tokyo
Tokyo institute of Photography, Tokyo 2018
We Do This
Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2019
In bright brief moments
Demo Gallery, Auckland , New Zealand, 2019
See what I can see: Discovering New Zealand photography
Suter Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand, 2017 (Nationally Toured exhibition)
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2017
Ten Years
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2017
The Blue Hour
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Traits
Corban Estate Arts Centre, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Three Colours Red
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2015
Now you see it…
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2014
Boys don’t cry
Heather Straka and Roberta Thornley
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2014
Saloon des Ferari
Ferari Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2013
Three Colours Blue
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2013
Sea of Fog
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2008
The Nathan Club, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012
Five Years
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012
Cruel & Tender
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012
Now and Then
Te Manawa Museum, Palmerston North, New Zealand, 2012
Everyday Irregular
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, New Zealand, 2011
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011
Game On
Hastings City Art Gallery, Hastings, New Zealand, 2011
Toy Story
The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, 2011
Another Universe
Calder & Lawson Gallery, University of Waikato, New Zealand, 2011
Deeper Water
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011
Uncanny Valley
Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2010
Paper Scissors Rock
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2010
Pretty Vacant
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2010
Melbourne Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2010
Black Market
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009
Words&Pictures
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2008
Aperitif
George Fraser Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2007
Portrait
George Fraser Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2006
Awards & Residencies
Mart Friedlander Award — The Arts Foundation, 2018
Tylee Cottage Residency, Whanganui, 2015
Art Five0 Trust Grant, 2013
Auckland Festival of Photography, inaugural commission, 2011
Collections
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Arts House Trust
Real Art Roadshow
Waikato Hospital Art Trust
Private collections New Zealand and Internationally
Books
My Head on your Heart — A petite booklet of text made to accompany the exhibition of the same name. Made with pages of delicate pink tissue. Edited by Jessica Kid and Designed by Joseph Salmon. 2020