The public lives of artworks can be occasional and itinerant—they emerge from the cosy sameness of storage into fresh locations and contexts. Many make their first public appearances alongside siblings from their maker’s studio, but later find themselves in very different company. While some resolutely maintain their identity no matter how or where they are shown, others open up to additional associations and meanings. Fittingly for a show about the power of alternative identities, several of the works in Dummies & Doppelgängers have evolved over time, shapeshifting into new lives or likenesses.

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Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artists Victoria Edwards and  Ina Johann have worked in artistic collaboration as Edwards + Johann since 2007. They take an interdisciplinary approach to art- making, combining photography, drawing, collage, performance, video and sculpture.

Curator Felicity Milburn spoke with the pair shortly after their month-long residency at Sutton House, during which they prepared sculptures for their upcoming Gallery exhibition. Edwards + Johann: Mutabilities—propositions to an unknown universe will combine these with other works made across the last five years to investigate ideas of response to place, connection and transformation. All of the works carry the indelible resonance of the unforgettable, and tragically unpredictable, geothermal environment of Whakaari White Island, which Edwards + Johann visited in 2018, prior to its devastating 2019 eruption.

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In 2022, the Gallery received an extraordinary gift: fifty-seven works by thirty-two artists from the private collection of writer, researcher and lecturer Karen Stevenson. Of Tahitian heritage, Stevenson was raised in Los Angeles and moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1995 to take up the position of lecturer in art history at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. She told Felicity Milburn just what the gift means to her.

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