Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Hye Rim Lee: Swan Lake
An immersive, dreamlike digital reinterpretation of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet.
Fred Graham: Toi Whakaata / Reflections
The long and distinguished practice of Aotearoa New Zealand artist Fred Graham (Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Tainui) is celebrated in this selection of significant sculptures and relief works from 1965 to 2013.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
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Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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Collection
Agnes Miller Parker Fish
Agnes Miller Parker was a prolific wood engraver and illustrated numerous publications throughout her career. She specialised in nature subjects, particularly animals and plants found in Britain. Parker studied at the Glasgow School of Art and was introduced to wood engraving by Gertrude Hermes and Blair Hughes-Stanton. All three artists worked as illustrators for the Gregynog Press in 1930. Parker was a member of the Society of Wood Engravers and the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.
Collection
Agnes Miller Parker Fox
Agnes Miller Parker stands out in this exhibition as an artist who had a natural affinity with wood engraving and ranks among the most talented of her generation. Her subjects were often traditional, featuring living creatures, and her working method shows extreme complexity – particularly in her delicate mark-making with the cutting tools known as burins, creating exceptionally subtle tonal contrasts. In this work, the careful cutting of the individual hairs of the fox’s fur creates an impression of softness. Fox was used as an illustration for H. E. Bates’ book Through the Woods (1936), for which Miller Parker created seventy-three wood engravings.
The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016
Collection
Eric Daglish Cabbage Butterfly
The London-based art critic Malcolm Salaman was very complimentary about Eric Daglish's work, writing in 1927: Mr Eric F. Daglish has a place of his own among our artists on the wood, by reason both of his chosen subject-matter and his decoratively individual manner of treating it. With delicate white lines on black, simply informing or elaborately grouped, and some rhythmic emphasis of white mass, he will depict the bird or quadruped amid its wonted surroundings of vegetable growth, so that these shall conform to a decorative pattern and yet seem to happen naturally. The bird may be on the bough, the frog on the marsh, the rabbit on the edge of the wood, but the artist’s graver will be no less concerned with the branch and its leaves or cones, the reeds and the rushes, the undergrowth, than with the plumage, the skin, the fur. And what a knowledgeable master of varied plumage is Mr Daglish […] But how decoratively alive they are!
The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016
Collection
David Michael Jones Stag
One of the striking things about all the artists in The Golden Age is their perfectionism, a necessary quality considering the medium they were working with – engraving the woodblock requires the utmost care and control as a mistake is very difficult to rectify. The quality of printing was also of concern, especially if the artist wasn’t printing the block themselves. The extremely fine detailed lines of the engraved block are notoriously difficult to ink and print: too much ink and the detail is lost, too little and the impression is not crisp enough. David Jones commented:
I think in the case of my work, it is particularly difficult because [the blocks] do depend to some large extent on really ‘sympathetic’ printing, they are very easily killed. I do ‘not’ think this is a virtue in them, far from it, perhaps, but it is a fact. The idea ‘only’ just gets across in any case & mechanical process simply dishes ‘em.
The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016
Collection
Gwen Raverat Poplars in France
A major figure in the British wood engraving movement of the 20th century, Gwendolen Raverat took an impressionistic approach to the medium. Rather than in the studio, she worked on many of her subjects, such as Poplars in France, out of doors. Raverat’s first wood engravings date from 1905 and, although she received little formal training, she excelled with the medium. She studied at the Slade School in 1908, and in 1915 settled in France with her husband and two daughters. Raverat was a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920. She returned to England in 1925 and continued to illustrate books.