Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland watercolourist Gertrude Ball moved to London to further her art training in 1920. She struggled to make a living as an artist, although she regularly exhibited with the Royal Academy of Arts. She became a member of the Society of Graphic Art and the Society of Women Artists, but described her journey as an artist as “a long uphill row to hoe”. She was friends with the Auckland printmaker Hilda Wiseman, who may have encouraged her to take up the woodcut. Around 1936 she began working on a major publication to be titled British Castles: A Book of Woodcuts, Written and Illustrated by Gertrude Ball. Although ultimately unpublished, it involved the creation of thirty woodcuts. Returning to Aotearoa after World War II she travelled to Central Otago with fellow artist Mabel Still, making several woodcuts of the region.

Ink on Paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Printmakers of the Modern Era, 11 February – 28 May 2023

Sentinels is a rare, early work by Thames, Coromandel-born Rhona Haszard. It shows her clear artistic vision and ability to make a sensitive, painterly response to a specific location. Haszard painted this impressionistic coastal landscape while at Canterbury College School of Art, where she distinguished herself as a star pupil between 1919 and 1924. This work was first shown in the Canterbury Society of Arts’ annual exhibition in 1923. Haszard left New Zealand two years later and began to make her mark as an artist in Europe, exhibiting in France, England and Egypt, where she moved in 1927 and died tragically young in 1931.

(Te Wheke, 2020)