Exhibitions
Events
On display
In Bloom
Steve Carr In Bloom 2020. Bronze, living plants. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland. Made with the support of Creative New Zealand.
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Hear from artist Steve Carr and landscape architect and environmental planner Di Lucas, as they reveal insights into the Gallery's new forecourt installation In Bloom.
Di Lucas will be joined by her planting team: Rosalie Snoyink, Fionn Heeran and Steffan Kraberger.
Steve Carr currently lives and works in Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand and is represented in New Zealand by Michael Lett, Auckland and in Australia by STATION, Melbourne/Sydney. He has been a senior lecturer at Ilam School of Art since 2016.
Di Lucas ONZM, Director of Lucas Associates, Ōtautahi Christchurch. Di is a Registered NZILA Landscape Architect and Life member of NZILA (2020) working in community-friendly planning, management and design processes for sustainable solutions. Having skills in landscape assessment, landscape ecology and restoration, community consultation, cultural and heritage values, and in creative problem solving for town and country, she works on a range of projects around Aotearoa New Zealand. She is advising on broad management frameworks and guidelines for lands and waters associated with regions, districts and rohe. She instigated the ecosystems guide for Christchurch City, and, preparation of Integrated Farm Plans to guide farmers in transitioning to carbon zero. Establishing her practice in 1979, Di has had various government appointments since 1982, including 27 years as Chair of the Nature Heritage Fund, a decade on the Ngā Whenua Rāhui komiti, and is currently a member of the High Country Advisory Group.
Related
Exhibition
Steve Carr: In Bloom
23 May 2021
Bronze-cast tyres and living plants present a contrast in materials, reflecting on states of permanence and change.
Commentary
Everyone to Altitude
Late on a mild spring afternoon in mid-September, I travelled out of the city to a farm paddock somewhere up the line near Amberley, up front in a battered van carrying six drone pilots and their gear. The sun was low in the sky and Ōtautahi was framed in an arch of nor’west clouds. It was the first fine day in weeks.
Artist Profile
Steve Carr: Transpiration
In Steve Carr's Transpiration (2014), huge carnations hover in half-dozen clusters on the wall. They start their lives looking like balls of cotton rags – white, bunchy, frayed. Colour then gathers at their fringes and grows into a slow leach that turns them yellow, or pink, or blue. The flowers’ inner folds wobble slightly. There’s a more general sway at their outer limits – a kind of peripheral rocking. Single petals peel away, minuscule movements that turn into sublime shocks when you manage to catch one at the edges of your vision.