Epiphytes: How does a conversation between artists last forever? : By Dina Jezdić

  • 400 million years ago, plants such as ferns and mosses began attaching themselves to the trunks and branches of other...

    400 million years ago, plants such as ferns and mosses began attaching themselves to the trunks and branches of other plants, seeking closeness rather than nourishment. Botanists call them epiphytes. From this early wave of plant pioneers that moved into the treetops, orchids later emerged, carving out their place as the mysterious and beautiful flowers we know today. They rest lightly on another living thing, adding presence and adornment. In a similar spirit, Wayne Youle works with the images of Ans Westra. Her photographs stand like the trunk of a tree, steady and rooted, while his colour and collage bloom across them, inhabiting their atmosphere and extending their life in unexpected directions. The photograph holds its ground while something bright begins to flower.

     

    Some of Westra’s photographs invite intervention, others resist. Youle senses instinctively where a flourish might amuse or a gesture settle. Westra’s eye lingered on the small absurdities of ordinary life: a child distracted beyond the frame, a performer both heroic and weary, the crooked tilt of a cheap mask. Her humour carried the memory of how the moment felt.

  • What makes the exchange between Wayne Youle and Ans Westra tender is that it began with friendship. Through their shared representation at David Alsop’s {Suite} Gallery, they often slipped into the back room at openings, leaving the crowd behind and instead forming a bond that would last for the rest of her life. In her absence, Youle steps into the space she once filled, guided by a single question: would she laugh? Across decades, the work becomes a conversation in which her spirit still lingers, vivid enough to respond, inviting each gesture to continue its course.

     

    Ans Westra’s 1965 photographs of a travelling circus passing through Wellington form the basis of this exhibition, The Circus Comes to Town (1965–2026). Seen from 2026, their familiarity is disarming. The scenes feel uncannily close, as though they have slipped into memory and settled there. For a moment, we believe we were there. The images hold the strange double life of the circus, a world of spectacle and promise. Children lean forward to see more. Performers repeat their routines. Workers carry the weight of the show. Magic sits beside mud, fatigue, and the practical mechanics of the day. Into these scenes Youle introduces colour that moves across the photographs like a second voice. It refuses realism, sometimes recalling the cut shapes of Henri Matisse, at other moments the immersive rhythms of Yayoi Kusama. The gestures remain light and inviting. Some read as quiet visual jokes shared between Youle and Westra, small conspiracies of humour the viewer is invited to overhear. Like good comedy, the work depends on timing and recognition, that instant when the room understands the joke together and a spark of shared awareness brings everything briefly to life.

  • In the nineteen eighties, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat painted side by side, layering gestures until the boundaries between high...

    In the nineteen eighties, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat painted side by side, layering gestures until the boundaries between high art, advertising, street language, and popular culture began to dissolve. A similar openness flickers here. References drift across the photographs: Warhol’s familiar banana, a monkey nodding toward Basquiat, and masks that recall the forms surrounding the figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. A small taniwha, borrowed from another photograph by Ans Westra, slips quietly into view. Nothing claims authority over the rest. Art history, humour, and the everyday gather on the same surface, faithful both to Westra’s sensibility and Youle’s instinct for storytelling and play.

     

    One image stands slightly apart: the clown. He gazes into the distance with the awareness of someone who understands every mechanism that keeps the circus alive. Up close, the details undo the romance. The wig is worn thin. The collar sits unevenly. The vest strains at its buttons. What emerges most clearly is the fatigue in his face, the weariness of a man who has repeated the same gestures for years. The costume should exaggerate the clown, yet it does the opposite. It reveals the worker beneath. One can almost picture him in Wellington in 1965 counting the minutes to the 6 o’clock swill. Youle approached this image with care. It already carried its own story. In the end he added only colour and left the man much as Ans Westra found him.

  • The result is a reluctant protagonist. The clown holds the centre through endurance rather than spectacle. Beneath the costume he...

    The result is a reluctant protagonist. The clown holds the centre through endurance rather than spectacle. Beneath the costume he resembles an ordinary labourer, closer to a factory worker finishing a long shift than a performer chasing applause. The circus ring becomes a workplace. The costume reads like a uniform. Standing there in his ill-fitting clothes he is almost too real for the fantasy around him, the grit of it all bubbling to the surface. Unpedestalled and unmistakably terrestrial, he anchors the series: familiar, divisive, and impossible to forget.

     

    In Quintuplets, five repeated trapeze performers hang above the ring against the dark sweep of the tent, each figure altered slightly in colour or detail. One man stands below, as though responsible for the improbable choreography unfolding above him. The scene turns gently absurd. Yet the humour never dissolves the tension. The performers remain suspended, the air high and uncertain, as if the circus itself depends on these fragile arrangements holding for another moment.

     

    Youle works like a careful visual storyteller. At first glance the collages seem casual, shapes drifting off centre without the polish digital tools promise. Yet the looseness is deliberate. Images are scanned, cut, and placed again until they arrive at the exact right imperfection. Seams remain visible. Scale slips slightly out of place. The result carries the familiar provocation that a child might have done it. That reaction is part of the joke. What appears effortless is the result of patient and attentive labour.

  • The strength of the collaboration lies in its balance, the reason it succeeds where many posthumous projects falter. Westra’s photographs are not relics but living taonga, carrying the attention that first brought these moments into being. Onto them Youle layers pigment and story that settle lightly, like an epiphyte on a tree trunk. One provides grounding, the other texture and new life. Neither dominates. The work carries a double energy, thoughtful yet mischievous, serious yet winking. In this exchange Westra returns, her images honouring ordinary lives with dignity and reminding us that the everyday world contains its own theatre. Through Youle’s touch, the conversation continues, alive, and shared.

     

    What emerges is a practice shaped by exchange, where Westra’s presence lingers in every gesture and the work becomes a hybrid space, subversive in its refusal to end with absence. Collaboration here feels expansive, generous, open to others who might one day enter the conversation, layering, responding, extending it without diminishing its mana. The project offers a simple, luminous lesson: art can be abundant, inviting, communal. Youle’s work rises on Westra’s living architecture, drawing strength from what came before while extending its reach into the surrounding light—a conversation that ripples outward, holding joy, humour, memory, and possibility all at once. Perhaps one day he will extend the same invitation to another, and they another still, the conversation widening gently, like ripples moving across water long after the first stone has disappeared beneath the surface.

     

    By Dina Jezdić 

    March 2026