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On display
Speaker of the Month: Julia Holderness
Florence Weir in a Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 2024
Photographic print
Julia Holderness
Friends
Education Centre
Friends $5, Non-Members $10, Students with ID free
The invention of Florence Weir, her artworks and her history, is a “device to facilitate connections that go beyond recorded histories and fill gaps.” In this talk, local artist Julia Holderness will discuss her figuring of Weir and specifically her involvement in the exhibition Modern Women: Flight of Time which was presented at Auckland Art Gallery. This exhibition highlighted the leading role women artists have played in shaping the development of modern art in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Julia Holderness is an artist based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand. She holds a PhD in practice-led visual arts from Auckland University of Technology (2022), a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury (2002) and an Honours (First-class) in Visual Arts from AUT University (2015). Her work traces alternative histories of modernism in New Zealand and her installations combine mixed media fabrications, often textile and ceramic making with historical materials from art and design archives. For SCAPE Public Art Season 2024 she designed a lightbox for the Hotel Montreal.
This event will be held in the Education Space on the ground floor of the Gallery.
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.
