Richard Penn - Stadium

27th Mar - 12th Apr 2025

The works in Stadium—pastel drawings, ceramic constructions, and found objects painted with ‘White Noise’—are a continuation of a project I have been engaged with since the late 1990s. This exhibition is anchored by a singular geometric focus: the dash, the circle, the stadium shape, and the arching stadium.

The stadium shape, in particular, provides the conceptual fulcrum for the show with its roots in the Stadium Billiard Problem—a mathematical model in which a particle moves freely within a stadium-shaped enclosure, reflecting off the walls in a pattern that is both deterministic and chaotic embodying randomness within a rigid structure. This paradox of control and unpredictability resonates deeply with Penn’s improvisational approach to making, where repetition and variation reveal a tension between order and disorder.

Penn’s ongoing White Noise series engages with notions of transformation, temporality, and provisionality—qualities that also emerge from the dynamics of the Stadium Billiard Problem. Since moving to New Zealand, he has gathered discarded objects from pavements and beaches, painting them with my version of white noise. These objects, once functional, bear the traces of their past use—bent nails, peeling paint—marking their transition from utility to obsolescence. Through their recontextualisation, they become artefacts of impermanence, mirroring the cosmic cycle of formation and dissolution.

White noise, in both its literal and conceptual forms, has underpinned his practice for nearly three decades. Its signal contains remnants of the Big Bang, an enduring echo of the moment that brought time and matter into existence. This idea—that we can perceive the residual energy of the universe’s origin—grounds his work in an ongoing meditation on entropy, renewal, and the materiality of time itself.
The objects and forms in Stadium enact a process of continuous becoming, shaped by chance and transformation, much like the chaotic paths traced within the stadium shape. They embody the inevitable return of all things to the undifferentiated field of existence:

“All forms that perish other forms supply, (By turns we catch the vital breath and die) Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne, They rise, they break, and to that sea return.”
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Richard Penn

Richard Penn is a South African artist living and working in Auckland, New Zealand and was awarded the Premier Award for the Portage Ceramics Prize 2022 at Te Uru Art Gallery in Titirangi. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including Public Record in Auckland, Gallery AOP in Johannesburg, Nirox Gallery in Johannesburg, Blank Projects in Cape Town, The Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Everard Read/Circa Gallery in Cape Town and Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg.

He has exhibited both locally and internationally and was the South African representative at The Rybon International Artists’ Workshop in Tehran, Iran in 2012. In 2014 he took up the Ampersand Fellowship to New York, USA. He is represented in private, corporate and academic collections throughout South Africa and internationally and has shown consistently at both Johannesburg and Cape Town Art Fairs In December 2020 he and his family relocated to New Zealand. In 2021 he was awarded a three month studio residency at Auckland Studio Potters as well as a month long residency at Driving Creek Potteries in the Coromandel in February 2022. He has taught sculpture at both the Otago Polytechnic and at Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University and is the curator of exhibitions at Auckland Studio Potters.

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Richard Penn - Stadium

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Richard Penn

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Richard Penn - Stadium

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Richard Penn

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