Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
Dynamic and progressive paintings and woodcuts from one of Aotearoa’s New Zealand foremost modernist artists.
Living Archives
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa
Whāia te Taniwha
Māori artists consider the enduring relevance of taniwha in Aotearoa.
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Collection
Joanna Margaret Paul View of Mokoia 1
During the last decade of her life, artist and poet Joanna Margaret Paul would often travel from her home in Whanganui to draw, paint and photograph the landscape in Rotorua. This work is from a series she made depicting Mokoia, an island in the middle of Lake Rotorua, viewed through the trunks and branches of slender shoreline trees. Paul described her art as a “play between inner and outer events”, and this work’s sensitivity and quiet sincerity reflect the joy and solace she felt in nature. She wrote: “As a painter/ poet I sometimes feel like a sieve or fine skin on the natural world which presses through my consciousness.”
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)
Collection
Emma Fitts Bomber Jacket for Marilyn Waring
Bomber Jacket for Marilyn Waring is part of a series by artist Emma Fitts paying homage to women whose lives and influence she admired. After spending time studying in Glasgow, Emma made this work in 2014 when she returned to Aotearoa New Zealand to take up a residency for the Olivia Spencer Bower Award. Suggesting a garment in preparation on the cutting-room table, it invents a partial, unfinished attire for a New Zealand politician, activist, and economist whose writing on women’s unpaid work remains influential and relevant.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Emma Fitts Anorak for Rowena Cade
This is one of a series of large-scale abstract garments dedicated to Emma Fitts’ personal gallery of heroines, a project that restores the narratives of women and queer artists who are often left out of conventional history. Anorak for Rowena Cade acknowledges the tenacity of British builder Rowena Cade (1893–1983), who built her own house and an ambitious outdoor theatre called the Minack, carved into the granite cliffs at Porthcurno in southwest Cornwall. Cade and her helpers built the Minack theatre using hand tools, and decorated it by etching into wet concrete with a screwdriver. In this work, Fitts has combined a practical material – oilskin – with delicate silk, calling to mind the staunch yet imaginative attitude that Cade must have had.
(Jane Wallace, 2023)
Collection
Emma Fitts Sports Jacket for Marlow Moss
Emma Fitts has created an abstract portrait of sorts in her collaged fabric tribute to Marlow Moss. Marlow was a British modernist painter and sculptor who in around 1919 renamed herself (from Marjorie Moss), adopted standard masculine attire, and worked in a refined constructivist style until the 1950s. Made during her Olivia Spencer Bower Award project in Ōtautahi Christchurch in 2014, Emma combined an interest in overlooked histories with formalist concerns, using salvaged silk scarves and woven plaid cloth to construct a personal gallery of role models and protagonists.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
