PANTHALASSA

Ashburton Art Gallery
Ashburton, New Zealand
15 August - 18 October 2026

Art has always endeavoured to comprehend the enormity of the natural world. In traditional Western landscape painting this has wavered between the picturesque and the sublime in attempting to map human subjectivity onto nature’s mystifying power.

Natchez Hudson paints detailed mountain ranges, inverted, upended and floating in fields of colour. By bisecting, obscuring, and sitting them in relation to abstract elements, he examines landscape painting’s contemporary utility. Highlighting its artifice, he disrupts its ordinary function as a ‘window to the world’.

The central installation presents an impossible geography: vertically protruding shards of landscape invite disorientation as these seemingly massive and permanent things are tipped on their sides. It reflects our inability to perceive the both land and climate as constantly changing over a vast timescale as their perceived permanency creates a barrier to long-term conceptualisation.

Panthalassa was the superocean that surrounded Pangaea, the ancient continent formed from almost all landmasses on Earth. For Hudson, Panthalassa is a useful analogy for our current era of climate change and sea level rise; a reminder of our deficiencies in comprehension and reticence to reconcile to these processes.

- James Hope, Curator