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For the exhibition Yellow Moon: He Marama Kōwhai (28 October 2017 – 28 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

Ethel Spowers’ Swings is full of vitality and enthusiasm. Strong bands of yellow on the sides of the airborne children suggest late afternoon light, filling the picture with energy and warmth. Spowers was an Australian artist who became well- known for her linocut prints in Australia and England in the 1930s. Both a painter and a printmaker, she was born into one of Melbourne’s wealthiest families (her father owned one of the city’s largest newspapers), enabling her to study art in Paris, Melbourne and London, where she first learned how to make linocuts. She was also a devoted supporter and social worker for the Melbourne Children’s Hospital. She must have really liked kids!

For the exhibition Yellow Moon: He Marama Kōwhai (28 October 2017 – 28 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

The word abstract can relate to ideas or things that are difficult to understand. It can also mean a particular kind of art, focused on shape, colour, line or geometrical form, without an obvious subject. Abstraction can mean being lost in thought – reflecting, contemplating or even daydreaming. That’s not something we’re often asked to do, but it’s what this work seems to invite. Stephen Bambury made this with simple materials: two squares of aluminium metal, varnish-like resin and graphite (what pencil leads are made of). Its materials and surfaces play against each other – glowing gold and shimmering dark – each reflecting light in different ways.

Michel Tuffery, a Wellington-based artist of Samoan and Tahitian Cook Islands descent, has taken cues from pop art in his use of food packaging to create the spectacular Povi Christkeke (which translates from Samoan as Christchurch Bull).

Constructed from recycled corned beef tins, this bull tells us that corned beef has become a staple food throughout the Pacific. Because of this it may be seen as a monster, an introduced beast grown powerful by replacing more environmentally friendly traditions of food production and gathering.

(Beasts, 2015)