Exhibitions
Events
On display
Doris Lusk: Pioneer Potter
Doris Lusk Untitled Mask c.1989. Earthenware. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1991. Reproduced with permission
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Potter Tatyanna Meharry remembers her grandmother Doris Lusk, her ceramic practice and her philosophy on life and art.
Doris Lusk was born in Dunedin and studied art at the King Edward Technical College there from 1933 to 1939. She held her first exhibition in 1936. Lusk and her husband, Dermot Holland, moved to Christchurch in 1943, where she exhibited with both the Canterbury Society of Arts and The Group. A potter as well as a painter, she tutored pottery from 1947 and was a foundation member of the Canterbury Potters Association in 1965. From 1966 to 1981 Lusk taught at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury.
Related reading: pottery, exhibition-1011, Free event
Interview
Raising the Clay
One of the themes explored in the Gallery’s new exhibition Leaving for Work is local industry, particularly in relation to pottery. The show includes an 1896 painting by Charles Kidson of well-known early Sydenham potter Luke Adams; three late nineteenth-century pots by Adams; and projections of a number of exceptional photographs by Steffano Webb. Keen to learn more, exhibition curator Ken Hall met up with local pottery historian Barry Hancox – perhaps best-known as former Smith’s Bookshop proprietor – and leading New Zealand photographer, Oxford-based Mark Adams. Mark’s links to this story include a distant family connection to Luke Adams; photographing many celebrated New Zealand potters of the 1970s and 1980s; and an abiding interest in land and memory.
Collection
Doris Lusk Towards Omakau
Painted in 1942, the year Doris Lusk moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch, Towards Omakau is an exhilaratingly expansive view of a landscape near Alexandra, in Central Otago.
The composition accentuates the numerous lines that stretch over its surface, as they curve around eroded cliff faces, and extend in darting tangents as rivers and roads and form regimented verticals in the shelterbelts. Sheep trails crisscross gently rounded hills, echoing clouds that swirl overhead. Reflecting on her practice in later years, Doris stated: “[I] have tried to get to the heart of the matter, involved with the complexity rather than simplicity in describing the nature of our land.”
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
Collection
Doris Lusk Landscape, Overlooking Kaitawa, Waikaremoana
In 1948, Doris Lusk and her family stayed in the Lake Waikaremoana region near Te Urewera and Hawke’s Bay, spending time with her husband’s daughter from his previous marriage. Lusk took on the complex challenge of depicting the local environment and the recently completed government hydroelectric scheme, designed to feed the increasing urban appetite for electricity.
'Landscape, Overlooking Kaitawa, Waikaremoana' is one of four works she completed, and includes construction workers’ temporary accommodation in the foreground. Mountains and buildings appear in the works as competing presences, each claiming their own monumental weight and status.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
Doris Lusk Power House, Tuai
Lusk described the power station at Tuai to art historian Lisa Beaven as a “gothic building in the middle of the wild hills”. Certainly, this striking oil painting plays up its strange incongruity, combining an abruptly elevated viewpoint with a heightened, stylised approach reminiscent of the unsettling streetscapes of Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). The tiny human figures moving briskly across the wide driveway accentuate the immense building towering over them, while the angled cars, curved road and power lines marching into the distance suggest a confluence of dynamic forces, barely contained.
(Doris Lusk: Practical Visionary, 4 June – 30 October 2016)
