Yona Lee at work in her Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland studio in 2024. Photo: Belmont Productions Ltd.
From 13 December 2024
A lively, restorative under-stairs sculpture for Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
Combining the intimacy of a domestic bathroom with the exuberance of a civic fountain, Yona Lee's new site-specific sculpture brings a lively, restorative energy to an understairs space. Fountain in Transit was commissioned by the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation to celebrate the Gallery building’s twentieth anniversary and responds to its name – Te Puna o Waiwhetū – which can be translated as ‘water in which stars are reflected’. Using flowing arrangements made from the kind of stainless-steel tubing associated with urban spaces and public transportation, Lee connects us with the Gallery’s architecture and history and draws on connections between water and wellbeing, opening a space for reflection and regeneration.
-
Curator:
Felicity Milburn -
Exhibition number:
1175
Related reading: Sculpture
Interview
Practice, Poetry and Precision
Artist Yona Lee has been preparing something very special in her Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland studio – a new commission that honours the history of the Gallery building, Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Lee took some time away from her workbench to speak with lead curator Felicity Milburn about her dream of filling the under-stairs space with water and light.
Notes
Face Five
Christchurch-born and internationally renowned artist Ronnie van Hout has had a huge hand in our latest outdoor installation. Quasi, a five-metre-tall sculpture of the artist's hand and facial features, was unveiled this morning on the Gallery's rooftop, next to Gloucester Street.
Interview
Not Quite Human
Lara Strongman: The title of your new work for the Gallery is Quasi. Why did you call it that?
Ronnie van Hout: Initially it was a working title. Because the work would be outside the Gallery, on the roof, I was thinking of Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I was coming out of a show and research around the idea of the freak, the outsider and things that are rejected—thinking about how even things that are rejected have a relationship to whatever they’ve been rejected by. And I called it Quasi, because it’s a human form that’s not quite human as well. The idea of something that resembles a human but is not quite human.
Exhibition
Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs
Exquisitely imagined, startlingly strange works by an internationally acclaimed New Zealand artist.
