Installation.

OPENING EVENT: Wednesday 7th July, 5.30-7.30pm

A group exhibition featuring new and recent work by EMMA FITTS (image), HENRIETTA HARRIS, DEREK HENDERSON, PATRICK POUND and EMILY WOLFE.

Recent works by EMMA FITTS arriving from the critically acclaimed exhibition “Touching Sight” curated by Melanie Oliver for the Christchurch Art Gallery (alongside works by Oliver Perkins and Conor Clark).   Fitts is interested in the histories of textiles and women artists, translating the form, composition and colour of twentieth-century paintings into bold sculptural textiles. 

UK based EMILY WOLFE continues the series begun in her sell out 2020 exhibition “Hinterland” where she explores layers and  plays with spatial ambiguity. In examining the hidden or unknown, she raises questions about the reality of the sensible world, and our incapacity to answer them. The paintings show what appear to be old French Romantic landscape paintings retrieved perhaps from an estate sale – creating a conversation with other landscape based works in the exhibition. Added to them are her own quirky signs of work – unwritten folded note pages, pieces of gauze stuck to and disrupting the serenity and illusion of pictorial space.

A small scale multi-part work by Melbourne based NZ artist PATRICK POUND presenting found postcards of the same waterfall in Colorado – repeated and differing views which intrigue audiences and encourage close viewing.  Assembling, collecting, combining and captioning form the crux of Pound’s practice, he returns again and again to the communication or manufacturing of information.

Recent photographic works by Sydney based DEREK HENDERSON.  He describes our landscape as - “....The steep mountains, the narrowness, the forest. It is quite dark. It’s moody, which is something you can channel into creativity, and explains why there are so many creative people in New Zealand.” These are moody photographic renditions of the New Zealand landscape reminiscent of historical painters such as Petrus van der Velden and Charles Blomfield.  

HENRIETTA HARRIS presents new landscape and seascape oils.  These are mystical renditions of imagined places. The surreal beauty of the environment—with its intense effects of sunlight through cloud, across mountains, and on water—allow her to produce works largely free of artistic deformation and with a distinctly photographic quality.