Creative Ones - The Van Gogh of cardboard

Recently, an artwork made me look twice. And on my second glance I was even more elated. Working with cardboard, paper and even chewing gum wrappers, Janet Perrior’s works are elegant abstractions that belie their simple recycled ingredients. Before we have even met, Janet has my full attention.

Lured to New Zealand from the UK over a year ago with partner David Burnham and his daughter, Cass Esposito (Director of Mansfield Gallery), the trio is an artistic force to be reckoned with.

Although softly spoken and delicate in appearance, don’t be fooled. Janet has been working on her art for over thirty years and during this time, rather than seeking a bread-and-butter line, she has become even more of an experimental risk-taker. “David says that when people ask him, ‘How long did it take?’ that he tells them, ‘forty years’. Because actually, you can’t just do it. It’s all those years that actually make you do something.”

Janet’s work takes discarded base materials, like cardboard boxes, telephone books and jigsaw puzzles (such as ‘Edge to Edge’ in July’s exhibition at Mansfield Gallery), that are essentially horizontal, and reveals their innards. Her works have stirred great interest. What has started as informative and representational has been folded, upturned or sliced open, translating the subtleties of materials into abstract compositions. “There’s a certain amount of randomness, but there is a lot of control as well. Because it’s quite meditative and calm, you are thinking as you’re building this up, so there are an awful lot of thoughts which go into it.”

While many art-makers may resort to recycled materials for their inexpense, for Janet it’s deeper. “I love working with recycled materials that had another life, and then you change it completely to something else. And it’s usually just something that was going to be thrown away.” One of her pieces, arranged slices of cardboard that have been allowed the freedom to bend and move, could happily live on my wall. For its static nature, this work captures the vulnerability of cardboard and I resist any temptation to say it looks like waves.

“In the UK, I used to belong to a group called Paperweight that included people working with anything paper-based. We used to exhibit every year and we always used to have a theme - and I can’t stand themes! It used to drive me completely insane, so I would always come up with a literal response. One year they called it ‘All Sorts’ so I literally did Licorice Allsorts. I was the only one who ever took it so literally.”

The thing about works that are created by Janet’s method is that they are ambiguous. They demand a second look, just like the woman herself. People are always striving for comparison, yet Janet takes it all with a grain of salt. “I had an exhibition once of the works with the Yellow Pages. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘That reminds me of Van Gogh’. And I said, ‘Really?’ And it was, vaguely, but it’s like the cardboard works where someone once said it was like lace. I mean, a lot of thoughts go through your mind, but Van Gogh and lace often aren’t the ones. It’s fascinating.”