Exhibitions
Events
On display
Julie King Memorial Lecture: Ngarino Ellis
Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou)
Friends
Sunday 29 September / 2pm
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free [Bookings Not Required]
Blinging up the body: Māori and adornment
The latest project of award winning author Ngarino Ellis is a forthcoming book Toi te Mana: A History of Indigenous Art from Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a landmark account of Māori art from the time of the tūpuna (ancestors) to the present day, written by two senior Māori art historians Ngarino Ellis and Deidre Brown and includes research by the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki. It features moko, adornment, rock art, textiles and architecture over a long time - from before the separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku to contemporary artists in Aotearoa and around the world today.
Describing her work as a “detective trail, with the joy and thrill of discovery” Ngarino Ellis will take us on a remarkable voyage through all aspects of body adornment across centuries of our indigenous art history.
Biography
Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is an associate professor in art history at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland. Her monograph A Whakapapa of Tradition: 100 Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930 (Auckland University Press, 2016) won several awards including the Judith Binney Best First Book at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and Best Māori Art Book at the Ngā Kupu Ora Awards: Celebrating Māori Books and Journalism, 2017. She co-edited Te Puna: Māori Art from Te Tai Tokerau / Northland (Reed, 2007) with Deidre Brown, and Te Ata: Māori Art from the East Coast, New Zealand (Reed, 2002) with Witi Ihimaera.
Ngarino has also collaborated as a curator, including Whakawhanaungatanga: Connecting People and Taonga (Linden Museum, Stuttgart, 2022–24) with Dougal Austin, Awhina Tamarapa and Justine Treadwell, and Pūrangiaho: Seeing Clearly (Auckland Art Gallery, 2001) with Ngahiraka Mason and Kahutoi Te Kanawa. She has published on many aspects of Māori art history including moko, adornment, art crime and gender.
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
Event
Speaker of the Month: August
This month we feature artists whose works will be in the silent auction at our Midwinter Dinner with Friends.
Event
Coffee + Art: August
Join the Friends for coffee and great conversation at The Thirsty Peacock, then enjoy a 30-minute Art Bite at 12pm. Bookings are not required.
Event
Midwinter Dinner with Friends
Join the Friends and toast midwinter with convivial company, fine food and excellent wine at Visions on Campus. This fun-filled and art-focused night is a wonderful opportunity to support local artists and the Gallery.
Notes
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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.
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.