Friends Speaker of the Month: Precious and Personal

Photo: Sarah Anderson. Featured works include Lucy Bucknall, Roberta Thornley, Liyen Chong, Gareth Williams, Jeremy Roake and Sarah Anderson

Friends

Wednesday 17 February 2021 / 6pm

Philip Carter Family Auditorium

$10, $5 Friends, students with ID free

Precious and Personal is an intimate look at favourite works from the personal collections of Friends of the Art Gallery.

Sarah Anderson will facilitate a conversation with five members of the Friends about the motivations behind their collecting and the joy they experience from their works.

Related reading: Friends

Friends Christmas Event: Inner City Exploration

Join a convivial tour of very different inner-city properties.

Friends Tai Tapu Trip

Join us on a tour of properties in the Tai Tapu region including a private tour of the Tai Tapu sculpture gardens.

Friends Curator’s Talk + Morning Tea

Friends Auckland Art Tour

Join a group of interested art enthusiasts on this weekend tour in and around Auckland.

With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.

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Collection

Julia Morison Dulia

In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”

The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.

Interview

The London Club

In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…

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