Review: Deity

"Haunting Works"
By David Wilson
Hawke's Bay Today, 2nd June, 1999

Kate White has chosen a problematical subject to wrestle with in her first solo exhibition. Not content to accept the Christian construct of God as delivered in her native New Zealand, she has drawn on two contradictory sources for a fresh definition: India (with its culture of ancient belief systems and elderly holy men) and youth.
All of her 14 oil paintings are portraits of young people, some little more than children, hedged about with a membrane of abstract imagery, and all bestowed with titles such as God of Music, War Goddess, God of Harvests and so on.
First impressions are depressing. If these are gods, they are not, by and large, happy ones. Stern young faces, several deeply troubled, others provocatively kittenish or rebellious, stare from predominantly nut-brown canvases.
At least six of the 14 are semi-photographic studies of faces encountered in White's travels in India, mostly the defiantly undefeated down-and-outs of the lower castes. In that they do not invite pity or compassion, but rather invoke respect for their stoicism. White may just have succeeded in depicting them as gods. Certainly they don’t have the comforts and angelic lieutenants of heaven.
She's been hard on her medium. Not for these canvases the rich texture of oils; here we have severely diluted paint, seemingly washed on rather than brushed; but what intrigues is the symbolism that surrounds each subject: some of it identifiable, much of it half-formed and bleeding into the frame.
And the panels; all except one painting have a narrow panel or band (or two) with exotic inscription or repetitive motifs. You're drawn to those panels for an explanation, as though they are subtitles in a foreign film. But no explanation is forthcoming.
Dark mysteries, then, all of them. And for an agnostic like White, a tortuous exercise in coming to terms with a concept that her self-description would seem to disavow. Clearly, months have been spent in creating these haunting works.
Maybe they have more to say about deification than deity.