Photographer Rhondda Bosworth is known for making work that is direct, disruptive and disarming. Her intimate images challenge the rules of photography and the male gaze. Mainly focusing on the body and portraiture, she uses contrast, movement, test strips and collage as strategies to create powerful images that retain ambiguity, mystery or elusive meaning. Narratives are suggested, but left for us to imagine. The artist also uses the camera and photographic devices to create distance from the emotional intensity of the content. She says: “Photographs are literally about light and dark. This provides an immediate metaphor for emotional light and dark, and for ambivalence and polarity. Images that work are about dual realities – the external physical world and the internal world of thought, feeling, fantasy and memory.”

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Areta Wilkinson’s art is grounded in the values of te ao Māori and shaped by long-held collective mātauranga (knowledge). The kōkōwai and coal that form this sculpture came from the same whenua of Te Waipounamu and connect the artist to the first mark-makers on this island, including her Ngāi Tahu tupuna (ancestors).

Her decision to hang these objects from flax cords echoes the way that tools were worn around the neck to allow for easy transportation from place to place within Aotearoa and beyond. Areta then swung the pendants so they left traces on the wall, opening up a fresh conversation between past and present.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)