Art as alchemy _{by Isabella Smith}

Anna Sisson’s paintings hang on the walls of the William Austin Gallery like question marks, interrogating and disrupting historical narratives and inherited mythologies to create images that are familiar yet changed, residing at an intersection between beauty and eroticism, disturbance and violence.  

Sisson is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist who works primarily with sculpture, exploring historical nodes of queer repression through religion and enlightenment, and overlaying ideas of desire, sexuality, and taboos to construct a new gaze. Her exhibition Temple of Romance will be on display until the 25^th of April.

Looking at the subjects in her paintings, it is evident that she grew up with her mother reciting Greek myths and poetry from William Blake: the biblical figures, angels, and caves, the Raphaelite cherubs floating among clouds, the landscapes representative of emotional and psychological experience.  

She aligns herself with the New Zealand Gothic lineage, a movement that examines inherited stories to reveal the power structures they prop up. “The romantic and gothic act as a bridge between the classical and the contemporary”, she says, adding they engage “with the land's darker undercurrents, themes of isolation, colonial anxiety, and the uncanny qualities of the landscape.”

“The cave became an important motif while I was thinking about creation stories, female banishment, and figures like witches and oracles”, she tells me. “I started connecting those ideas to ‘caves’ in my own life, internal, psychological, and physical spaces, and weaving those together.”

Sisson says the paintings operate like pages from a book: atmospheric, dreamlike moments suspended in time and bound by their frames. Three sculptural pieces in the collection behave more like recently unearthed archaeological forms. “The gallery becomes the frame, and the viewer completes the work through their own judgment.”

Sisson collected pebbles, wheat, glitter, and sand from different beaches to add broader historical weight to the sculptures. Mixing in the raw materials embeds land into the artworks, land that is haunted by shrinking shorelines, its colonial past, and a sense of isolation and loss. “The found materials act as ingredients in the alchemy of art making… They transform objects into meaning and turn earth into gold.”

The design and intention of the exhibition extend beyond the subversion of symbols and mythology, the alchemy of found materials, the unreality created by the ethereal colour palette, and the write-up – which reads like a poetic treatise on hermeneutics. The frames too carry their own set of questions.

Behind the painting XX is a cross that “references crucifixion, particularly in relation to the historical persecution of women, queer people, and religious outliers. At the same time, that imagery has been reappropriated in fetish cultures, where ideas of suffering, transcendence, and the body are reworked… But the form can also be read as an ‘X,’ a kiss, the XX chromosome, or a mark of refusal.” 

Sisson’s works are full of tension, demonstrating that the sublime is both overwhelming and unstable.