Exhibitions
Events
On display
Whanganui Art Trip
Friends
28 – 30 March 2025
$500 per person (does not include accommodation or travel)
Nestled on the south-west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui North Island, Whanganui is home to a concentrated treasure trove of Aotearoa’s finest art and craft.
The trip will commence on Friday evening with a welcome from the Friends of the Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery, at the home of one of Whanganui’s preeminent art collectors.
Saturday will be filled with visits to studios and art galleries, including well-known glass art duo Emma Camden and David Murray, and local mixed-media artist Katherine Claypole. One of the beauties of Whanganui is the number of art galleries, museums, studios and cafes, all within easy walking distance or each other and the iconic Whanganui awa. This trip has been designed to take advantage of this geographical concentration.
Sunday will focus on exploring the newly reopened jewel in the art crown of Whanganui, the Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery. Closed for 10 years, for a long time its future hung in the balance. However, due to the enormous effort of a dedicated group of art lovers the necessary renovations have been undertaken, including a new addition to the original gallery. The Sarjeant Friends and gallery staff will guide us through the various exhibitions and share some of the stories surrounding the reemergence of this beautiful place.
To round off the weekend we will visit a truly unique private museum dedicated to Aotearoa ceramics – the Quartz Museum of Studio Ceramics. The Rick Rudd Foundation was established in 2013, and in 2014 Rick purchased what has now become the Quartz Museum. The museum is open to the public and offers an opportunity to view an extensive and once private collection of outstanding New Zealand ceramics.
The trip ticket includes all visits, welcoming events and lunches.
Exclusions / Terms and Conditions
- Accommodation and travel are not included.
- Dinners are not included, but venue options for Saturday and Sunday will be offered.
- Recommended travel options to Whanganui include flying to and from Palmerston North. If there is sufficient uptake a bus service can be arranged to provide transport to and from Whanganui. Friday departing Palmerston North Airport at 3pm. Monday morning departing Whanganui at 8.30am. This allows for connection to several flights from Ōtautahi Christchurch on both days.
- Accommodation recommendations are available on request.
Related reading: Friends
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
To book tickets from your phone, follow these simple steps (or click here for instructions with images).
- Find the event you’d like to book for on our website www.christchurchartgallery/friends
- Scroll down until you see the Book Now option; click on the down arrow to select the date you’d like to book then click book now
- Check you are booking for the event you’d like to attend
- If you are booking for a Friends only event, you will notice the number of tickets is greyed out. To login and access Friends only tickets, click on the door image at the top of the page
- Enter your email address and password
- Now that you’re signed in, you can enter the number of tickets you’d like to purchase
- Check you’re happy with your cart before you checkout
- Let us know who is attending the event
- Let us know of any special requests and tick the Terms & Conditions box then complete your sale
- Pop your payment details in then submit. And don’t forget to save your ticket to your phone for easy access on the day of the event
Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
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.
