Exhibitions
Events
On display
Land Marks: Stone-hammering Jewellery Workshop with Areta Wilkinson
Areta Wilkinson Hei Tupa 2013. Oxidised sterling silver, polyester. Collection Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2016
Areta Wilkinson, the artist working on Whakapapa I (from Moa Hunter Fashions series) 2018. Waimakariri and Rakahuri river stones, tree stumps, kōkōwai (red ochre), silver. Image courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland
Workshop
Past event
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
$20
Join moa-hunter descendant and artist Areta Wilkinson (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Waitaha) in a hands-on 50-minute workshop.
Using copper pieces and river stones from the Waimakariri and Rakahuri rivers, Wilkinson will demonstrate the stone-hammering method she uses to create her adornments, guiding participants to create their own unique wearable piece to take home.
Through studio practice and applied research Wilkinson expresses concepts of Ngāi Tahu whakapapa (genealogy links and relationships) and mahinga kai customary sites of natural resources and cultural production. Like her ancestors before her she utilises local resources for the task at hand – hammerstones from the Waimakariri and Rakahuri Ashley Rivers, local pigments, clays and gold.
Layers of relationships to the past are ever present. Through photograms of moa butchery bones and refuse from early campsites, 3D prints of archaic artefacts used for mark making on ceramics, shapes and forms referencing historic Ngāi Tahu visual culture.
Moa-Hunter Fashions is a new iteration of the project Wilkinson made for the the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.
All materials provided and bookings essential.
Related reading: Jewellery, Māori
Exhibition
Areta Wilkinson: Moa-Hunter Fashions
18 September 2020 – 8 February 2021
Artist Areta Wilkinson recalls whakapapa through object making.
Collection
Areta Wilkinson Hei Tupa
Areta Wilkinson combines her contemporary jewellery practice anchored in an awareness of the body with traditional Māori systems of knowledge, in which objects are often used to make connections between people and to convey stories. Previously she has made works that relate to the taonga whakarākei (personal adornments) of her Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu ancestors. “These works do not seek to replicate an existing image of the world”, she has said, “but instead alert me to a new way of seeing from the world in which I stand, whilst still maintaining a relationship with the past.”
Hei Tupa is a contemporary take on a tupa, or scallop shell, necklace from Rāpaki near Ōtautahi Christchurch. In making this work, Areta asserts the role of Ngāi Tahu tūpuna as the first artists working in the region.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Notes
Māori video artists on display in Christchurch
Works by more than twenty Māori moving image artists will be on display at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in August.
Notes
Aotearoa
A texture-rich new exhibition at Oxford showcases the considerable talents of six Canterbury artists.
Notes
Host a brooch
A number of Gallery staff are planning to take part in the final Host a Brooch event this weekend.
Commentary
Curating Oceania
The idea for an exhibition of Oceanic art originated from the Royal Academy itself, proposed in 2012 by its then artistic director Kathleen Soriano, an Australian. The exhibition was imagined to fit within the Academy’s occasional programme of ‘civilisation’ or ‘world art’ exhibitions, inaugurated in 1996 with the ground-breaking Africa: Art of a Continent, and followed by exhibitions such as Aztecs (2002), China (2005), Byzantium (2009) and others. These exhibitions sat among the gallery’s more usual fare of historical European, modern and contemporary art.
Commentary
Te Āhua o te Hau ki te Papaioea
The ‘Operation 8’ anti-terror raids in October of 2007 were the culmination of a police investigation that led to the raiding of homes across New Zealand. The raids were conducted after an extended period of surveillance, which was enabled through use of the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act. In 2013 the Independent Police Conduct Authority found that police had “unnecessarily frightened and intimidated” people during the raids.
Interview
Looking at Forty Years of Māori Moving Image Practice
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive is co-curated by Bridget Reweti and Melanie Oliver. The following text is a conversation between the two curators around co-curating, archives and Māori moving image practice.
Commentary
Bringing the Soul
As an eleven-year-old boy from Whāngarei, sent to live in Yaldhurst with my aunt in the late seventies, Christchurch was a culture shock. Arriving in New Zealand’s quintessential ‘English city’, I remember well the wide landscapes and manicured colonial built environment. It was very pretty but also very monocultural, with no physical evidence of current or former Māori occupation or cultural presence, or at least none that I could appreciate at that time.
Artist Profile
Lisa Walker: 0 + 0 = 0
It might be tempting to say that Lisa Walker makes jewellery out of any old thing – but it isn’t true. The eclectic objects that form her distinctive necklaces, brooches and other body-adornments are meticulously selected and shrewdly modified before they see the light of day. She salvages her materials from an unlikely cornucopia of sources – re-presenting objects such as car parts, animal skins and even kitchen utensils through the frame of body adornment’s long history. Tiny Lego hats, helmets and hairpieces – of the kind that clog vacuum cleaner nozzles in children’s bedrooms around the world – are strung on finely plaited cords like exotic beads or shells; trashy gossip magazines are lashed together to yield a breastplate befitting our celebrity-obsessed culture; dozens of oboe reeds donated by a musician friend bristle round the wearer’s neck like the teeth of some unimaginable deep sea leviathan.
Article
The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery
Was it serendipity that the opening of Christchurch Art Gallery's Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker coincided with that of Slip Cast, a group exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum that also focused on the pleasure that artists take in manipulating materials in the process of making art?
Collection
Fiona Pardington Mauria mai, tono ano
The title of this work means ‘to bring to light, to claim again’. The seven heitiki (greenstone pendants) Fiona Pardington has photographed came originally from her iwi, Kāi Tahu, in Te Waipounamu. All are now held in the collection of Auckland Museum. Traditionally worn close to the heart, heitiki are sacred fertility symbols in te ao Māori, strongly associated with whakapapa (family connections across time). Fiona not only wanted to record the physical attributes of these old and precious objects, but also to capture their more intangible qualities, such as how they speak of the past and this place, despite being stored so far away.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )