Exhibitions
Events
On display
Paper, Creature, Stone
Francis Upritchard A Peach 2021. Steel and foil armature, paint, modelling material, fabric, metal, straw, rhinestones, leather gloves
Talk
Past event
Meet in the exhibition
Artist Francis Upritchard and lead curator Felicity Milburn will be discussing the ideas and practices involved in the development of this new exhibition.
Pushing a stone up a hill alone is no fun. Francis Upritchard’s arresting new installation recalls the solitary punishment endured by Sisyphus, but instead endorses the power of collaboration to meet even the most daunting challenges. Begun during her time at Sutton House, Ōtautahi’s newest artist residency, her works have been made with help from old and new collaborators from here and across Aotearoa, including potters, weavers, jewellers, dressmakers and more. With both care and playfulness, Upritchard combines textures, colours and scales – the second-hand with the handmade, the tiny with the monumental – in an unforgettable combination that will reward the curious visitor.
Related
Exhibition
Francis Upritchard: Paper, Creature, Stone
2 April – 7 August 2022
A major new installation fired by collaboration and connection.
Collection
Francis Upritchard Wife
Francis Upritchard is a fascinated and perceptive observer of people and other animals. Her works often capture behaviours and expressions that are shared across species. As primates, humans and monkeys are, of course, especially alike. Upritchard’s baboon spouses are persuasively individual – absorbed in their own thoughts and worlds, just like the rest of us.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
Collection
Francis Upritchard Husband
Francis Upritchard is a fascinated and perceptive observer of people and other animals. Her works often capture behaviours and expressions that are shared across species. As primates, humans and monkeys are, of course, especially alike. Upritchard’s baboon spouses are persuasively individual – absorbed in their own thoughts and worlds, just like the rest of us.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
Collection
Francis Upritchard rainwob ii
The work on the three tables at the centre of this room is part of a series of sculptures artist Francis Upritchard has described as “an attempt at an unsuccessful utopia”. Like the flipped-back word in its title, it seems to set off in one direction – towards a kind of visionary, psychedelic paradise – but overturns our expectations to arrive somewhere much less certain. Locked away in intensely private reveries, the delicate, marionette-like figures that inhabit it are curiously enigmatic: part-primeval bog people, part-countercultural prophets, they live out their radiant existences somewhere between the ancient unknowable past and the distant unknowable future.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)
Collection
Francis Upritchard White tankards
Francis Upritchard is better known for her large figurative sculptures, but some of the first things she made were domestically scaled ceramics. As a child in New Plymouth her family knew several potters, and she and her siblings were sometimes allowed to add their own small pieces into the wood kilns during firings. In recent years, Upritchard has collaborated with a number of professional New Zealand potters, creating works that both draw on, and undermine, the traditions of functional stoneware. Here, she disrupts and reanimates the familiar, functional form of the ceramic tankard, a drinking vessel that has existed almost unchanged since medieval times.
(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)
This work consists of two tankards of different sizes. One is 200 x 180 x 145 centimetres, the other is 170 x 195 x 140 centimetres