What’s On
New exhibition opening soon
From Here on the Ground
The Design Store is having a revamp!
We'll be closed while we get a fresh new look. Visit us again from 14 May.
Exhibition closing soon
Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Free entry, free wifi
Collection
Gertrude Hermes More People
This is the largest wood engraving in the exhibition, and was cut from several blocks glued and clamped to one another. Gertrude Hermes’ interest in the human form was mirrored in her work as a sculptor, and like her contemporary Eric Gill she was able to successfully transition between both mediums. Unlike the hard-edged style of many of Gill’s wood engravings, however, Hermes’ line is sinuous and flowing with various tonal gradations throughout the work. As a sculptor she had a good understanding of human forms, which in More People seem to overlap and merge into one another.
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
Clare Leighton Threshing
Clare Leighton was a distinguished wood engraver in both England and America. Her parents, the popular fiction writers Marie Connor and Robert Leighton, influenced her to write and illustrate her own books. The two woodblocks shown here appear in her first book, The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry, published in 1933. The Farmer’s Year illustrates the twelve months of the year on the Buckinghamshire farm where Leighton was living. These wood engravings illustrate threshing in March and apple-picking in September.
Leighton said: “Getting to know the farmers and working with them, I learned the pattern of the year as I shared the shepherds hut at lambing time. I stooked the grain at harvest and climbed ladders to pick apples. I had come home.” Leighton felt a great connection to rural life, finding this a more honest way of living than what workers experienced in the city. This outlook was similar to that of the earlier French realists such as Jean-François Millet, who created celebratory depictions of farm life at a time when many people were leaving the countryside and moving to urban areas.
(Leaving for Work, 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)
Collection
Clare Leighton Resting
Much of Clare Leighton’s work as a wood engraver focused on rural labourers going about their lives in the countryside. These works were used extensively as illustrations in her popular books on country life during the 1930s, including The Farmers Year (1933), Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle (1935) and Country Matters (1937). The skill of Leighton’s wood engraving is evident in this work, where her exquisite and delicately cut lines create incredibly soft tonal variations. The subject is drawn from her time spent in a lumber camp on Canada’s Quebec-Ontario border. One of the most important manuals on wood engraving remains Leighton’s 'Wood-engraving and Woodcuts' from 1938.
