Public Programmes | Gavin Hurley & Martin Poppelwell Artist Talks
On Saturday 25th July at 11am as part of our ongoing but occasional series of public programmes at the gallery, GAVIN HURLEY and MARTIN POPPELWELL will give artist talks about their work in our current group exhibition. All welcome.
GAVIN HURLEY will discuss work from his recent "Cook Voyages" series exhibited earlier in 2015 at the National Portrait Gallery in Wellington as part of "Tranquility Disturb'd" curated by Richard Wolfe. For this series he chose previously overlooked subjects from the voyages - the servant boys who sailed on Cook’s Endeavour. The lack of any known images of these lads was no deterrent; rather, Hurley relished the shortag...e of historical information and the opportunity to ‘invent’ personalities. In the process he wondered about the personal backgrounds and circumstances of these young seafarers, and their experiences on one of the greatest voyages in history. Despite all that happened and the success of Endeavour, Hurley describes the voyage as seeming ‘like a total fantasy’. One of his subjects, Nicholas Young, is of course familiar to us; as the first member of the crew to sight New Zealand, he gave his name to Young Nick’s Head.
MARTIN POPPELWELL will discuss the series of new ceramic works made in collaboration with guest artist MAX GIMBLETT. Both Poppelwell and Gimblett place a high value on the daily practice of drawing and meditation. Over a period of four days in late 2014 the artists did just this at Poppelwell's studios on Bluff Hill, Napier. The results are a range of surprisingly direct and humorous works that elaborate on the discussions the artists had while making the artworks and reflect upon aspects of their current thinking about practice, influences and geographies.
This will also be the last day of the exhibition.
The audio recording of this talk is now available on line - https://vimeo.com/134515725
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