B.

Showcasing the world of Joanna Braithwaite's painting – part menagerie, part bestiary, part human zoo.

The world of Joanna Braithwaite's painting is part menagerie, part bestiary, part human zoo. In her richly brushed canvases, the laws of nature are calmly bent and wonderful hybrids emerge. Snakes stretch into swans, frogs rain from the sky, and humans are lofted skyward by birds and butterflies. Painting her strange creatures with such assurance that they seem perfectly natural, Braithwaite reminds us how strange 'the natural' really is.

Born in Halifax, England, in 1962, Joanna Braithwaite grew up in Pleasant Point, South Canterbury, and trained as a painter at the Canterbury School of Art, where she won numerous awards. Currently living in Sydney, she has continued to exhibit regularly throughout New Zealand. To look back over her two-decade career is to watch as a painter adds entry after intriguing entry to an ever-expanding catalogue of creatures – a catalogue, she never lets us forget, that includes the human viewers who encounter the paintings. Braithwaite explores the relationship between the human and animal world without sentimentality and with a freshness that encourages the viewer's engagement.

Wonderland tracks the highlights of Braithwaite's recent career and focuses in particular on her painterly explorations of extraordinary encounters between humans and the world of creatures. The result of a partnership project between Christchurch Art Gallery and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, it is accompanied by a 48-page full-colour catalogue with essays by Justin Paton and Felicity Milburn.

The exhibition has been developed as a collaborative project with Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Exhibition presented in association with the Christchurch Arts Festival.

Text taken from Bulletin issue 140.