Bird Land: Te Kāhui Manu
The islands of Aotearoa New Zealand were once inhabited by birds. Shrieking, warbling, tinkling, booming. Forest, river, marsh, mountain, ocean, shore—everything charged with their mauri, life force.
Made in the Pacific: A Collection of Tāoga
A selection of Pacific tāoga from the Canterbury Museum in conversation with contemporary artworks that highlight the continued strength in culture and traditional art forms.
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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Collection
Michael Parekōwhai My Sister, My Self
Michael Parekowhai’s My Sister, My Self recalls a once-common sight in suburban New Zealand front gardens: the concrete seal with a chrome ball on its nose, a home-grown version of the performing circus seal. Connecting to other histories, it also recalls the kekeno, the New Zealand fur seal, which had an unfortunate central role in our pre-colonial past.
At the pinnacle of this spectacular balancing act is a replica of the artist Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1913 Bicycle Wheel – a bicycle wheel upside down on a wooden stool. Duchamp made it for his own pleasure – he liked spinning the wheel in his studio – and later described it as his first ‘readymade’.
(Beasts)
Collection
Betty Harrison Persimmon (Study of a Racehorse)
Chrystabel Aitken and Betty Harrison both grew up in rural communities where they developed a great love of animals – an interest they both explored as students studying sculpture under Shurrock at the Canterbury College School of Art during the 1920s and 30s. Aitken’s interest in the natural world was manifest in her sculptures, prints, applied arts and ceramics, most of which focused on depictions of animals. A Bull is her tribute to the famous nineteenth-century French painter and sculptor of animals, Rosa Bonheur. Aitken flourished under Shurrock and in 1926 was appointed his assistant at the art school, leading to a close friendship for the remainder of their lives. Harrison studied sculpture under Shurrock. Persimmon (Study of a Racehorse) suggests a talented, promising student, but she decided to change career paths in the 1930s to become a nurse. Harrison died tragically young in 1937, aged just twenty-five.
(Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries, 8 March – 13 July 2025)
Collection
Graham Sutherland Armadillo
The armadillo lives in South America. Its name means ‘little armoured one’ in Spanish. Among the twenty different species of this interesting creature, the three-banded armadillo is the only one that can roll itself into a tight ball when it needs to for protection.
The painter Graham Sutherland made this print as part of a ‘Bestiary’ published in 1968, a collection of twenty-six lithographs featuring different animals, each one suggesting a particular human-like quality. Curling tight, this armadillo may be expressing fear.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Duncan Grant Collie Dog
Collie Dog is from a set titled ‘Six Lithographs’, a collaboration between Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, with each artist contributing three works. Grant’s three lithographs also included Hawk and The Cat and were produced at Miller’s Press. Grant was an active printmaker throughout most of his career, producing prints alongside his activity as a painter, designer, potter and decorator. He is a major figure in 20th century British art and was a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was also closely associated with the Omega Workshops which operated in London between 1913 and 1919.
Collection
Eileen Mayo Cats in the Trees
Eileen Mayo obviously had a love for cats as seen in this personal feline study. There’s a harmonised balance in the print and the cats look as ifthey are inseparable. Mayo specialised in depicting animals and the domestic cat was one of her favourite subjects. Cats in the Tree was a favourite linocut of Claude Flight’s and he used as a frontispiece for his instruction manual The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing (1934). He described it as a linocut of good form and colour composition. Clark’s Siamese Cats is much more simplified. They lounge round, curled up with each other, against a plain backdrop. A far cry from the images of mechanisation that Flight encouraged they remain excellent examples of the way that imagery could be simplified in linocuts.
(One O'Clock Jump: British Linocuts from the Jazz Age, 7 December 2024 - 11 May 2025)
Collection
Artist Unknown, Balthazar Paul Ommeganck A Cow
This cow belongs to an ancient breed of cattle, once common in Belgium and the Netherlands, but now almost extinct. Called the Kempens rund (Campine cattle), it was bred for milk, cheese, butter and beef; its numbers were greatly reduced during World War I when the farming area where they lived became a battlefield.
This painting is probably by the Flemish painter Balthazar Paul Ommeganck. He was one of many admirers of the Dutch seventeenth-century painter Paulus Potter, who had started something new in painting by making farm animals his main subjects, rather than minor, incidental elements.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Michel Tuffery Povi Christkeke
Michel Tuffery, a Wellington-based artist of Samoan and Tahitian Cook Islands descent, has taken cues from pop art in his use of food packaging to create the spectacular Povi Christkeke (which translates from Samoan as Christchurch Bull).
Constructed from recycled corned beef tins, this bull tells us that corned beef has become a staple food throughout the Pacific. Because of this it may be seen as a monster, an introduced beast grown powerful by replacing more environmentally friendly traditions of food production and gathering.
(Beasts, 2015)
Collection
Edwin Henry Landseer Chimney Sweeps
The son of an esteemed London engraver, Edwin Landseer displayed prodigious talent by exhibiting his paintings at the Royal Academy from age thirteen. This work, made when he was twenty, portrays the harsh reality of child exploitation in 1820s Britain, and the perilous occupation of chimney sweeping.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
Compare Wellcome Collection 562349i
