Echo

 OPENING EVENT: Wednesday 21 May, 5.30-7.30pm

A group exhibition featuring new and recent work by Kirstin Carlin, Veronica Herber, Rebecca Wallis and Emily Wolfe (image detail).

KIRSTIN CARLIN’s new works Untitled (cluster), Untitled (clump), Untitled (bundle), Untitled (jumble) are named for collections—for groups. Groups of painted marks, groups of flowers. These works were painted from bunches of flowers and plants gathered from Carlin’s autumn garden: muehlenbeckia, hydrangeas, kawakawa, ageratum, among others. A study in colour, form, and the changing seasons, painted in Carlin’s recognisable gestural style.

Carlin’s practice is defined by an interplay between figuration and abstraction. Known for her vibrant, rhythmically painted compositions, she draws on recognisable imagery from art history - particularly still life and landscape painting, reinterpreting these subjects through bold brushstrokes, and a distinctive colour palette.

Kirstin Carlin is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland based artist. She completed a Master of Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art in 2010 and has exhibited both nationally and internationally in artist-run spaces, private galleries and public art institutions including prestigious exhibitions such as Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki 2015-16 curated by Natasha Conland and a major solo exhibition . Through the Trees at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2017-2018 when she was invited to respond to work by Frances Hodgkins in the collection.  Recognition for her work has included the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award (2017), Creative New Zealand Professional Development Funding (2009) and a William and Mary Armour Postgraduate Scholarship at the Glasgow School of Art (2009).

Of VERONICA HERBER's recent work, Dina Jezdic writes....“There is a meditative wisdom in Herber’s approach, an understanding that life seeks to flourish, not through striving or accumulation, but through a deep connection to what nourishes us. Her process—layering strips of Japanese masking tape into careful, geometric arrangements—mirrors the natural rhythms we often overlook: the steady beat of a heart, the swell of a tide, the growth of a plant toward the sun. These rhythms, so fundamental and quietly persistent, remind us of a truth we all carry: that life, at its core, is about returning to the things that sustain us.

Each rectangle, line, and pattern stands as a testament to the essential beauty of form, the wisdom embedded in repetition. Her work is less a display and more an invitation to slow down and tune in—to feel our own breath, to hear our own pulsating cadence, to connect to something profoundly alive within us. Herber seems to ask, “Are you flourishing? Are you thriving?” Her pieces call us to peel back the complexity that clutters our lives and rediscover the quiet clarity of simply being.”  

Veronica Herber is a full time artist based in Tamaki Makaurau who has exhibited throughout Aotearoa and internationally. Upon graduating from AUT, Herber was invited to participate in several large outdoor sculpture shows  - she has been included four times at Sculpture by the Sea (Sydney, Australia), three at Waiheke Headland on the Gulf exhibitions and created installations in Mexico and Cuba. 

REBECCA WALLIS exhibits for the first time with Melanie Roger Gallery with a painting that recently won the New Zealand Paitng and Printmaking Prize for 2025.   “This piece is concerned with absence. I identify with the vulnerable transparency and the fragility of these materials. I'm seeking to question our desire for order, our need for the fixed. This piece reviews these moments when we have been jettisoned into this place of deep vacancy and silence.”

Rebecca Wallis’ practice questions the separation created through desires to fix, and hold. Her work reviews the meaninglessness of our existence. When the ‘I’ collapses, when “who I think I am ruptures and what remains is this strange experience of more”.   Wallis makes analogies between the painting and the Self, the painterly and the corporeal. Her practice loosens the constructed painting object to reference these allusive states we experience that lie outside of language and resist meaning. To Wallis, this loosening of order suggests a continuum between the Self and Other. Is there is more to the Self than what we know or think the Self to be? She refers to states of Abjection, Jouissance, and the Semiotic, Lacan’s ‘Real’, Freuds Uncanny.

Walls’ constructions consider a formal equality where each and every part of the object is visually acknowledged, where the unseen becomes seen, referring to this continuum. She intends to open spaces up for experiences that reconsider our expectations made from the certainty of the tangible – of surface, edges and boundaries. She deconstructs and reforms her silk supports and the ‘traditional’ painted surface, reconfiguring them into something on the precipice – but just outside – of recognition.   Wallis’ practice is about a constructive reviewing, be it an emotional realm, or a reconfiguration of familiar visual signifiers.

EMILY WOLFE’s paintings are meditations on the past, filtered through a distinctly contemporary lens. Her imagery is a world both familiar to us, yet surreal; a place where remnants of classical landscapes collide with elements of our everyday — paper scraps, adhesive tape, and fragments of well-worn objects. Wolfe’s work is deeply rooted in the materiality of memory, where the layered textures of her paintings echo the stratified narratives of archaeology, an influence stemming from her early research excavating historic sites in Europe.

Through a process that begins with physical collage, Wolfe meticulously arranges cutouts and ephemera, transforming the fleeting and discarded into layered compositions that resist easy interpretation.  Her palettes are soft yet deliberate, marked by the kind of restrained beauty often found in faded photographs or delicate antiques. Here, light is more than mere illumination; it’s a participant in the narrative, casting quiet shadows that invite us to wonder what has been left unsaid or hidden from sight. Indeed Wolfe’s canvases hold traces of unseen lives, drawing attention to the gentle decay of time and the stories embedded within everyday objects.

Through her work, Wolfe redefines still life and landscape, positioning them not as static genres but as active dialogues between history, memory, and the present moment. Her paintings become spaces of reflection, layered recollection —dreamlike, haunting, and rich with ambiguity.

Emily Wolfe graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1996, then completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, graduating in 2000.  She has exhibited consistently since then, with over twenty solo shows. She has several awards and residencies throughout the United Kingdom and is held in numerous public and private collections throughout Aotearoa and internationally.  Most recently she had a sell-out solo presentation in January 2025 at Art Singapore with Brisbane based dealers The Renshaws.