Nocturne: a musical composition inspired by, or designed to evoke the atmospherics, mood or emotional qualities of the night – a style characterised by tranquillity, melancholy and reflectiveness. At night the recognisable shifts towards indistinct and the things of the world become diaphanous. During this period, senses become heightened in the darkness; scotopic vision engages, causing the loss of colour perception. Night also occasions a psychological as well as a physiological shift, where the events of the day are reflected upon, then consolidated and integrated through dream.
Kara Burrowes and Charrette van Eekelen’s Nocturne plumbs the associations we make with the night. They work in concert and have aligned their respective practices to create an associative experience of the nocturnal within the gallery, through a body of work that gradually unveils subtle details. Receptive to sustained looking, together the works open a space that evokes the potency of the night upon the psyche. Employing scale, tone, contrast, light, texture and sound (or its absence), they create an environment that submits a web of associations that encircle nighttime as a conduit for an array of affects upon the viewer. Among a diverse range of mediums, fabric and thread is handled in a painterly manner, in the service of both the monumental and the intimate.
Some works invoke scenes seemingly devoid of any human presence, that could equally allude to inscapes as to landscapes. Others depict real locations – places that operate independently from the diurnal cycle, and which are essential to the maintenance of modern existence. van Eekelen has rendered scenes of Lyttelton port using a process of collaging and stitching various types of fabric, where elements of the industrial landscape are picked out in stark artificial light – empty carparks, playing fields, and shipping containers. In Because the Night, Lyttelton road tunnel is fashioned in fabric and sequins, creating the impression of movement through the structure; the tunnel’s white tiled walls shimmering in the reflection of vehicle headlights. Some of Burrowes’ works incorporate found objects, which include detritus recovered from around railway tracks – items cast off by freight trains, or amongst the general litter that ends up accumulated along the line.
The artists join a lineage in modern art history of artists making use of darkness to transmit psychological or spiritual themes. In an Aotearoa New Zealand context, it is the work of Ralph Hōtere and Colin McCahon that remain the most salient in this regard. Burrowes’ paintings might be compared to McCahon’s Dark Landscape (c. 1965) works, that incorporate sawdust mixed into the paint, resulting gradations of tonality and texture, evoking the immensity of an all-encompassing darkness upon the land. In a suite of small-scale scenes, van Eekelen depicts the night sky peppered in points of light – stars or the aftermath of exploding fireworks. They find a natural affinity with nineteenth century American artist James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (c. 1875), that portrays a fireworks display in an industrial city park. Associated with Tonalism, where subdued, moody landscapes were depicted in dark hues, it was Whistler that titled his night-time scenes Nocturnes to emphasise the aesthetic correlation between them and the musical compositions of the same name.
To further define Nocturne as a space of heightened sensory input for reflection and aesthetic contemplation, ‘black noise’ is piped into the gallery. This is the ‘colour of silence’, with an energy level of zero across the power spectrum, detected as very low frequencies in the ear. Employed as a masking tool, this ‘negative sound’ is able to counter ambient noise from the environment, resulting in a sense of stillness. This gives the impression of the gallery as a hermetic space that emphasises the sense of a thickness to the works, encompassing murky abstraction, archetypal landscapes, recognisable scenes, and pure atmospherics.
Nocturne allows the mind an excursion through an environment that will carry different emotional resonances for each viewer. Through dense layering and recombination of materials, scenes are constructed that are by turns recognisable or hover on the edge of comprehension. It is a near universal experience to look out upon a vast landscape at night and feel a sense of awe. What is obscured within the darkness provides a space for the projections of the imagination. Nighttime conjures up primordial emotions, and this can play to feelings of either comfort or unease. It can also unlock recollections from within the mind’s deep recesses. It is a productive realm of exploration for two artists that are guided by concerns such as nostalgia, longing, memory and a deep attunement to their surroundings’ impact upon the consciousness.
James Hope, Curator of the Ashburton Gallery
May, 2026