Other People's Flowers

OPENING EVENT: Wednesday, 26 August, 5.30-7.30pm

In 'Other People’s Flowers', Kirstin Carlin, Julia Holderness and Gavin Hurley turn to the language of flowers to speak both with and through the history of New Zealand art. The exhibition takes its title from the act of gathering what already exists—motifs, compositions, gestures—and re-presenting them, not as imitation, but as a form of attentive response. Flowers become intermediaries here: symbols of homage, translation, and quiet disruption.

Gavin Hurley’s practice has long been grounded in portraiture and the codes of representation embedded in art history. In this exhibition, the figure remains, but is partially obscured—interrupted by blooms that drift across the surface of the painting. Faces are veiled, identities made uncertain. These flowers do not simply decorate; they complicate. They act as both screen and signal—exposing the portrait as constructed while withholding it from full view. In responding to art historical precedents, Hurley layers his subjects with floral forms that echo the compositional weight of earlier works, suggesting that depiction is always entangled with what has come before.

Kirstin Carlin’s work, by contrast, leans into materiality and gesture. Her floral forms are looser, more provisional—hovering between recognition and abstraction. Where Hurley’s paintings retain the structure of portraiture, Carlin’s seem to test how far an image can drift from its source while still carrying its trace. Her flowers do not quote so much as metabolize: paint becomes a site where art history is broken down and reassembled into something at once familiar and estranged.

Julia Holderness revisits a body of work first developed for 'The Studio', an exhibition presented at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2021. That project explored the shared studio of three young New Zealand artists - Doris Lusk, Anne Hamblett, and Molly Lawn - who rented a space and worked together in central Ōtepoti Dunedin, in the years following art school (1939-40). Flowers were a recurring presence within the shared studio: gathered, arranged, painted, and returned to as subjects of observation and conversation. For this exhibition, Holderness revisits Hamblett’s and Lusk’s paintings from that time through a series of vase works which draw upon their still-life compositions and the flowers and textiles depicted within the paintings. Through acts of close looking, reinterpretation, and response, Julia considers friendship, influence, and the generative possibilities of shared creative practice across time.

Together, the artists approach New Zealand art history not as a fixed canon but as a living ecology—one that can be pruned, grafted, and made to flower again. The works in 'Other People’s Flowers' draw on well-known images and compositional strategies, yet resist direct citation. Instead, they operate through echo and displacement.

The exhibition invites viewers into a process of recognition that is never fully resolved. You may sense that you have encountered these images before, but they remain just out of reach. This slippage is central to the project. By obscuring, abstracting, and constructing the figure through flowers, Carlin, Holderness and Hurley open a space between visibility and invention, asking what it means to inherit an image—and how that inheritance might be both honoured and unsettled.

Flowers, in this context, are not passive symbols of beauty or transience. They are active agents of translation. They carry meanings across time, across artists, across contexts—while also reminding us that meaning is never stable. Cut from one setting and placed in another, a flower can signify reverence, interruption, or renewal.

'Other People’s Flowers' is ultimately an exhibition about looking again: at images we think we know, at histories we take for granted, and at the layered, sometimes obstructed ways artists continue to speak to one another across generations.

Image: Gavin Hurley, 'Boy with Louise Henderson's Flowers', 2026, oil on linen, 500 x 400 mm

Julia Holderness exhibits courtesy of Sanderson Gallery.