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June Black’s figure is trapped within a web of thick lines. The character comes from the artist’s extensive cast who make up her metaphorical world of intellectual discovery. Black brought this world to light in the late 1950s through a series of one-persona exhibitions in Wellington and Christchurch. Her wider project combined elements of art, theatre, philosophy and literature with irreverence and wit, but was often misread as mocking in an earnest and male dominated culture. The artist’s daughter novelist Sheridan Keith asserts that Black’s ‘search for meaning within a meaningless world was a deeply serious one’. The Cold War with its fears and existential concerns provides the broader context to Black’s searching, humorous and melancholic art.

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