Exhibitions

Room One

Upcoming Archive
Kakapo by Jon Tootill

Kakapo

Jon Tootill

16 October to 04 November 2018

Kakapo (Night Parrot) The title Kakapo, or Night Parrot, suggests a playfulness with the colour and patterns that have their genesis in raranga (weaving/plating), tukutuku (wall panel weaving) and whakairo (carving). The colours of each painting do not refer to the colours of vegetation or birds as in previous works but more to the music of people such as Fats Domino, or Howard Morrison and Jerry Merito of the Howard Morrison Quartet, who were popular in the 1950/60’s. Their happy-go-lucky music infused life with colour.

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Upcoming Archive

Upcoming Room 1

Achromatic  - Ray Haydon

Achromatic

Ray Haydon

06/11/18 to 25/11/18

Negative space is defined by the solid objects it surrounds. This is one of the physical aspects of Ray Haydon’s sculptural practice that really matters; he is actively “painting” the air with materials to fabricate constructions in space.

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Tio - Simon Kaan

Tio

Simon Kaan

27/11/18 to 16/12/18

Kaan’s work has previously been described as “contemporary and timeless,” a notion that seems to fit well with many of the indigenous relationships referenced in his artmaking. Like Chinese ink and wash works, Kaan’s paintings and prints are not just straightforward reproductions; his work is more of an attempt to capture the intangible or the spirit of a subject. Using a restrained colour palette, often monochromatic or sometimes monochromatic with a single burst of colour, Kaan’s landscapes are uncluttered, contemplative and leave space, as writer Claire Finlayson proposed, for a viewer to ‘breathe’.

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Room Two

Upcoming Archive
A Curious Pursuit by Meighan Ellis

A Curious Pursuit

Meighan Ellis

16 October to 04 November 2018

The need to collect and arrange is an impulse to make sense of the world. Originating in childhood via potent experiences with her grandparent’s geologic samples, Ellis found herself in a stratified world of taxonomies, of specimens, of identification and the display of lithic forms. This delight from collecting and looking would eventually be coupled with picturing masculine beauty. Her photographic practice has since amassed into a personal archive, a collection with a predilection for mineral silicates and male portraits. .

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Upcoming Archive

Upcoming Room 2

Looking Up - Shintaro and Yoshiko Nakahara

Looking Up

Shintaro and Yoshiko Nakahara

06/11/18 to 25/11/18

Though each possess very distinct outputs, both Shintaro and Yoshiko’s practices are concerned with precision and planning. They share an intuitive approach and an obsessive, manual process. It is perhaps these qualities that have helped the two artists to successfully develop the “third artist,” a term they use to describe their collaborative practice. While it is easy to draw out the individual artists from their collaborative works – colour from Shintaro and black line work from Yoshiko – the “third artist” is actually inseparable.

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Florence & Florence: other textile histories - Julia Holderness

Florence & Florence: other textile histories

Julia Holderness

27/11/18 to 16/12/18

Julia Holderness has explored her own textile making alongside that of Canterbury artist and teacher Florence Akins (1906 – 2012). Re-working a range of archive materials from the Macmillan Brown Library & Heritage Collections that relate to Akins and her teaching of textiles at the Canterbury College School of Art, Holderness presents their possible entanglement with the international Bauhaus movement.

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