Pippa Sanderson's latest show could have been a real mess. She was going to leave jars of inky bubble-solution and piles of party straws at High Street Gallery where she is exhibiting and invite visitors to contribute to the show by blowing inky bubbles on the wall. "I did some tests in the studio and the ink bubble mix splattered all over my face and hands. It looked like I'd discovered a new disease." Thinking that gallery visitors weren't going to be impressed by catching her 'disease', she decided to make the work herself. Pippa Sanderson's latest show could have been a real mess. She was going to leave jars of inky bubble-solution and piles of party straws at High Street Gallery where she is exhibiting and invite visitors to contribute to the show by blowing inky bubbles on the wall. "I did some tests in the studio and the ink bubble mix splattered all over my face and hands. It looked like I'd discovered a new disease." Thinking that gallery visitors weren't going to be impressed by catching her 'disease', she decided to make the work herself.In the days leading up to the show, Sanderson will blow bubbles directly on the gallery wall. She aims to cover the 10 metre length, completing the wall painting on the first day of the show so people can see the process. She has also blown a range of coloured bubbles onto watercolour paper, which she will install in the gallery.

"I blew rose-tinted bubbles on paper to evoke the idea of a failed Utopian dream," says Sanderson.

The title of the show, Utopia or oblivion, was taken from a Buckminster Fuller book. Fuller was the inventor of the geodesic dome and an icon to the hippy counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s with his utopian visions, including solving the housing crisis by building floating dome cities. Today about 300,000 people worldwide live in dome houses.

"Utopia or oblivion was a warning for the future," says Sanderson. "Utopia is a vision of a perfect place. New Zealand was viewed by settlers as a utopia in colonial times, a social experiment. Some alternative religions and cults had their most faithful followers here, and the hippy subculture was an echo of those alternative movements."

"The hopeful, childlike bubble-blowing activity echoes a kind of utopian spirit, a wishful optimism. When they inevitably burst against the wall they leave a beautiful trace. So there's still something retrievable in even a broken Utopian dream, something to reflect on. I'm a cup half-full kind of a person," says Sanderson.

Sanderson's other work in the show is made of watercolours where ghostlike figures hover in a watery world. The tie-dyed quality of the ghosts evokes the lineage of counter-culture and alternative thinkers that settled New Zealand in the late Victorian period, like the artist's great-grandparents, spiritualists and pacifists based in the far north, or her mother - an artist who at one time had an alter-ego called 'mother Green Witch', an ecologically motivated street performer.

When: 13 November - 4 December 2007
Where: High Street Project, Level 1, 140A Lichfield St, Christchurch

12/11/07