Buttons in a Bottle: Contemplation#2, A Personal Response
As many who work in the museum sector will know, once you’ve curated an exhibition, it is difficult
to experience it as a first-time viewer would, even if you can experience moments of pleasure as you
discover new things over time. However, as Curator at the NZ Academy of Fine Arts, I have had the
privilege to experience Marie Potter’s Contemplation#2, an exhibition I have not curated, almost as a
first-time viewer.
Occupying the NZAFA’s LightSpace gallery throughout March 2013, Contemplation#2 was the
culmination of the artist’s Masters research and as such there are references to great theorists and
artists. All of this is relevant, but my real joy was encountering the exhibition and its objects in a
more visceral, even poetic sense.
It was on contemplating Potter’s assemblage of assorted white buttons in an old glass milk bottle,
wooden peg clipped right on its rim, that I discovered her exhibition for myself, that I realised what
she had achieved. For this artist has an understatedly deft way of selecting objects and putting them
together. Why a milk bottle, buttons and a peg, just so?
The beauty of the buttons-in-bottle assemblage is that it doesn’t prompt me to ask ‘why?’ in any
‘normal’ sense, to delve into the artist’s choices in the way one might consider another artist’s
choice of media, subject matter and techniques. Potter’s assemblage just seems ‘right’: it has its own
poetics and it feels right within the poetics of the exhibition. There is a poetic meta-language at work
around me and it gives this assemblage a life of its own. It is a life enriched, in an abstract sense, by
the history and beauty of the objects that make it, but it is a life of its own, somehow familiar but
ultimately beyond my everyday experience.
From the buttons in a bottle I turn my attention to a rusted Kodak camera, containing a tea strainer
and a watch. Then there is an old leather bag containing a pair of gloves and a plethora of other
objects, some possibly for medical use, but I wouldn’t really know what. And there is also a large tin
that has seen better days: it is propping up a small axe draped with a long lace glove. They are all
objects given a reverence by the artist, sitting in the light of the gallery’s wonderful arched window.
They give me the ability to face the central table of medical instruments, laid out in neat
arrangements of rows.
Being a woman, I know I am faced with gynaecological instruments, not that I’ve had first-hand
experience of these ones in particular, but they do remind me of modern-day instruments and
procedures. I of all people should know something of these, having had major surgery for chronic
endometriosis only four years prior, carrying the scar. But these are not instruments that frighten
me, for they seem too bent towards that same kind of reverence as the rest. They speak to me more
generally; I don’t demand to know the gruelling procedures and unspeakable moments of truth that
might accompany them. Those could be there, but I am in a different space, the space of the
exhibition, where poetics are at play. It is the poetics of taking objects and putting them together to
give them a new life, a collective life that knows its scars and has had a myriad of experiences. A life
that is also one with which to enjoy the previously unknown rightness of an illuminated bottle of
buttons, with peg.
Jodie Dalgleish
Curator
NZ Academy of Fine Arts