Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
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Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Julie King Memorial Lecture: Linda Tyler
Linda Tyler
Friends
Sunday 21 September / 2pm
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free [Bookings Not Required]
"I did not want to be Mrs Colin McCahon": the life and art of Anne Hamblett (1915-1993)
Four years older than her husband-to-be Colin McCahon, Anne Hamblett was regarded as the superior artist at the Dunedin School of Art where she studied for her Diploma between 1934 and 1937. Her first class passes, scholarships and prizes should have propelled her into making art her career, but unlike her friend Doris Lusk, (who was able to muster 60 paintings for a solo show at the Moray Place studio in August 1940), Hamblett was never prolific. Married in 1942, with four children born between 1943 and 1949, Anne Hamblett's artistic profile diminished after she became Anne McCahon. What happened to her desire to be an artist, and what can the story of her life and art tell us about the choices that women artists make?
Linda Tyler has taught art history at Canterbury, Victoria, Waikato and Auckland universities, and design history at Unitec and Otago Polytechnic, and been an art curator at Waikato Museum, the Hocken Library and Gus Fisher Gallery. She wrote her MA thesis on the Austrian architect Ernst Plischke and her PhD on the Colonial Museum botanist and draughtsman John Buchanan. Since 2018 she has been convenor of the Museums and Cultural Heritage programme at the University of Auckland.
Lecture presented by the Friends of the Art Gallery courtesy of the Estate of the late Julie King. Art historian Julie King was Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Canterbury and an Honorary Life Member and Patron of the Friends.
Related reading: Friends
Notes
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Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
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.
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.
