Page 11 - Art First: Alexandra Haynes: The Shapes of Nature

so that her f nished works seem plausibly representational, despite their evident level
of abstraction. There is a sense of freedom and playfulness, liberation and delight. Through
the symbols of her physical journeys, Haynes expresses the feelings and emotions of her
inner journey through life, creating, as Kandinsky describes it in Concerning the Spiritual in Art,
a response in the viewer that can be compared to a vibration. Similarities might also be noted
between her use of perspective and distortion and that of Edward Wadsworth, who himself
translated and was inf uenced by Kandinsky. A fellow voyager, Wadsworth was interested
in the new vision of the world opened up by air travel and many of his paintings and wood -
cuts look down from above, skewing traditional perspective, and allowing him to arrange his
components as if on a parallel plane. The horizon is opened out, space is modif ed: anything
is possible. This same strain of Surrealist potential and expectancy abounds in Haynes’
compositions. There is something jubilant about her botanical jungles, contained by a strict
geometry, yet retaining their freedom. Fronds entangle and spikes threaten, reaching out
of the canvas; white shapes appear as negative space, portals to another world.

Plato argued that geometrical knowledge is eternal and deemed art to be no more than
a copy of copies–something imitating the objects and events of ordinary life, themselves
but copies of his underlying theory of Forms. Yet all of nature ultimately evolves out of simple
geometric patterns incorporated within a molecular seed structure and Haynes’ work ref ects
this, aligning the beauty of each and juxtaposing eternity with temporality. For Haynes, the
f ora and fauna of her paintings are the vocabulary; the planes and lines the syntactic rules.
Through her years of experimentation, rejecting and reviving certain compositions and
combinations of colour and form, collecting motifs and expressive symbols along the way,
she has created a distinctive personal language, one that is poetic, evocative, and lyrical.

Anna McNay