What’s On
Update from director Blair Jackson
What Level 2 means for your Gallery.
Spheres: An Online Video Project
Moving image works about social distance and personal environments.
Design Store
Retail therapy for the discerning customer.
Open seven days from 10am to 5pm – free entry, free wifi.
The Gallery is a perfect safe space for some quiet contemplation, art appreciation and select shopping.
We’re limiting numbers and working hard to keep all the spaces super clean for your safety and that of our team.
Notes
Te Tāhū o ngā Maunga Tūmatakahuki
There is a gorgeous new addition on the side of Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Artist Kelcy Taratoa has created a wall work to replace Kay Rosen’s Here Are the People and There Is the Steeple, which was in place for eight years. Its title is Te Tāhū o ngā Maunga Tūmatakahuki (see below for an explanation) and it was created in association with our soon-to-be-revealed exhibition Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania. The exhibition’s themes of exploration, belonging and connection were a starting point for Taratoa’s thinking, and he worked with the support of mana whenua, including Nathan Pohio, to ground the work in local narratives that relate to discovery and whakapapa.
Notes
Congratulations to the winners of Blue Globe: Stories from Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
During lockdown, young writers between the ages of 8 and 18 have been busy completing their entries for Blue Globe: Stories from Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Any work in our online collection could be used as inspiration; the works entrants chose this year can be viewed here.
A number of staff volunteered to be on our judging panel: Sarah Pepperle, Anita Paris and Tara Elder took the 8-10 year olds; Lana Coles, Gwynneth Porter and Nick Priddy the 11-14s; and Sarah Pepperle and Gwynneth Porter the 15-18s. The judges really enjoyed reading each piece and were amazed and delighted at the imagination shown and the quality of the entries.
Below are our winning entries alongside the artwork they used for inspiration - enjoy!
Notes
Highly Commended entries, Blue Globe: Stories from Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Our competition for young writers attracted a number of entries this year, and the judges had many excellent pieces to choose from when deciding on a winner for each category. It was really tough to choose favourites from such an exceptional bunch of writing, but here are the judges' top six choices for Highly Commended prizes for you to enjoy. Congratulations to them, and to all the writers who entered this year.
Notes
Director’s Update
With a welcome shift back to Level 2 in our collective fight against COVID-19, we are delighted to reopen our doors to visitors.
Notes
Update from director Blair Jackson
Kia ora koutou. Hello.
I want to let our supporters and art lovers know what we are doing in these difficult times, and how you can still find moments of relief and escape through art. Like much of the world, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is temporarily closed to our visitors and our staff. Like many of you are experiencing in your own lives, we’ve needed to figure out new ways of working, staying connected as a team, and working out what we can offer and ways that might help us to engage, inspire and connect you with great art and ideas.
My Favourite
Jason Greig's Vulcan Paradise
I’ve had a quiet fascination with Jason Greig’s work ever since I was a Year 13 student hanging about Burnside High’s art block (which, granted, wasn’t that long ago). My then printmaking teacher, Nichola Shanley, is a good friend of Jason’s and managed to get him along to one of our classes.
Artist Profile
A Lifelong Affair
It may have been Rachel Hodgkins’ assertion during her daughters’ childhood in Dunedin that Isabel would be the painter in the family that drew out the stubborn streak in her younger daughter Frances. And indeed, as the fates were to prove, Isabel, once married, had to put aside her brushes for the most part to care for her family, while Frances, rather than making her way as a piano teacher as her mother had intended, chose a different course. Spurred on by her Italian tutor Girolamo Nerli’s descriptions of the bohemian life in Europe and the artistic revolution taking place in certain quarters, she set out for Europe, determined to prove her family’s assumptions wrong.
Commentary
RE: UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE
In a recent essay Zadie Smith wrote of language as a “verbal container” – like all containers it allows the emergence of some ideas while limiting the possibility of others. The words and terms we choose, or those which are offered to us, “behave as containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think.” She is discussing writing fiction, defending the right to, and value of, drifting into other imagined bodies and taking a good look around, regardless of their likeness to our own biographical specifics. It is an uncomfortable position to hold in a cultural climate where, Smith argues, “the old – and never especially helpful – adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.”