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Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa
A major exhibition featuring works that tell stories about personal and collective histories, communication, distance and relationships to our environment.
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Our Out of Time exhibition is closing soon.
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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The Golden Age
Collection
Paul Nash Promenade
Paul Nash was a member of England’s Society of Wood Engravers in the 1920s, and this work, one of his earliest wood engravings, highlights his instinctive approach to the medium. Rather than be tied down by traditional wood-engraving practices of precision and accuracy of line, his mark-making is free and immediate. A jagged, hard-edged perspective intensifies the scene. The waves breaking on the seawall form a series of varied, simplified patterns and shapes. The elongated figures, dwarfed by the wall, intensify the scale of the structure. Nash’s rough and intuitive techniques in cutting the end-grain wood serve to intensify the image and highlight an artist approaching a medium with much tradition under his own terms.
The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016
Article
Tomorrow, Book, Caxton Press, Landfall
In the decades before and after the Second World War, Christchurch experienced a remarkable artistic efflorescence that encompassed the visual arts, literature, music, theatre and the publishing of books and journals. And the phenomenon was noticed beyond these islands. For instance, in his 1955 autobiography, English publisher and editor of Penguin New Writing and London Magazine, John Lehmann, wrote (with a measure of exaggeration, perhaps) that of all the world’s cities only Christchurch at that time acted ‘as a focus of creative literature of more than local significance’.
Notes
Five eyes by Eric Ravilious
This article first appeared as 'Artist captured poetry in wood carving' in The Press on 11 November 2014.
Notes
Lorton, Cumberland by Tom Chadwick
This article first appeared as 'Wood engraving artist finally won recognition' in The Press on 27 June 2014.
Notes
Ruth Lowinsky by Eric Gill
This article first appeared as 'An oblique profile' in The Press on 12 July 2013.
Notes
Death and the woodcutter by Leo Bensemann
This article first appeared as 'Death mastered' in The Press on 28 March 2013.
Collection
Eileen Mayo Skaters
Two prints from early in Eileen Mayo’s career show the strength of her natural ability. Eileen was nineteen and studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, when she made the wood engraving Skaters. She made Turkish Bath a few years later in response to an invitation to put work in the Second Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery, London. Her invitation came from Claude Flight, the linocut’s principal champion, who reportedly instructed her on the technique over the telephone. She had met Flight, a teacher at the Grosvenor School of Art, while working there in 1929 as a life-class model.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
E. Mervyn Taylor The Magical Wooden Head
New Zealand’s most respected wood engraver, E. Mervyn Taylor remains renowned for his delicately engraved and beautifully designed prints. He was drawn to Māori mythology for much of his subject matter, in particular George Grey’s collected legends published as Polynesian Mythology in 1855.
In this work he depicts the myth of the Ma- ori sorcerer Hakawau defeating a carved magical wooden head whose stare will cause death to anyone who looks at it. As with his contemporary British artists, Taylor’s wood engravings were also used for illustrative purposes, and in 1946 he produced a limited edition book of his wood engravings through Christchurch’s Caxton Press – which can be seen elsewhere in the exhibition.
The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016
'A book of wood engravings' by E Mervyn Taylor is in the Robert and Barbara Stewart Library and Archives and can be viewed by appointment