base with multi-disciplinary oyster exhibition

The Depot Artspace’s ambitions to broaden its offering are captured in its latest exhibition featuring a Ma - ori and Pasifika collective, which is itself exploring the boundaries between art, fashion and culturally based entrepreneurship.

Oyster Workshop’s colourful show, Oyster & Moon, brings the work and wares of 15 artists and designers to Devonport. It coincides with the launch of the creative consultancy’s online platform, but is also an opportunity for a sculptural encounter.

The main gallery features four specially commissioned spherical artworks, along with other installations, including woven pieces. In the smaller Street Front gallery, wearable woven pieces and jewellery are for sale, including raukura (feather) earrings created with repurposed inner tubes from bicycle tyres.

Gallery manager and curator Nina Dyer, who has brought a fresh focus to the exhibition space – moving away from walls for hire, to the rigour of presenting selected works, including an exhibition that ended last week of photography from rising Tamaki Makaurau talent – is stretching boundaries with the latest show. “That they were keen to come to Devonport is exciting,” she told the Flagstaff.

And in turn, Devonport gets to see something different from a multi-talented group.

One of the artists, Tui Emma Gillies, has family connections to Bayswater and once taught at Westlake Girls High School. She was involved in a group show, Matrilineal, held at the Depot last year and often works with her mother, a champion of Tonga tapa.

Both Depot director Amy Saunders and Dyer are keen to build relevance and broader community connections into what it does, while also cementing the Depot, which includes recording studios and arts-training programmes, as a unique destination.

Gillies has completed one of the four commissioned sculptures, all inspired by the pearl and the moon. Tracey Gardner (who goes by the working name Miss Maia), Anastasia Rickard (Natura Aura) and emerging artist Shawnee Tekii produced the other main sculptures.

Among other featured creatives are Lissy Cole Designs, which contributes its neon crochet fused with traditional Ma - ori whakairo design to the exhibition; Jeanine Clarkin, a Waiheke-based pioneer of Ma - ori fashion in Aotearoa; and O Te Motu Creations, for whom Haley Lowe crafts contemporary talismans.

Other artists from across the motu and the Pacific add their perspectives and taonga. The show’s name and inspiration is said to be a metaphor for the resilience of the pearl, in creating beauty from adversity and the moon, which connects the people of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa to the rhythm of the planet.

Oyster & Moon runs until 26 April at the Depot Artspace, Clarence St, Devonport. Find out more about the collective at www.oysterworkshop.co.nz

Company Theatre’s production of Jerusalem was the big winner at the annual Northern Area Performance and Theatre Awards.

The caustic comedy, which was staged at the Rose Centre, Belmont, last November, won six awards, including best show, best director, and best male in a lead role, which went to Narrow Neck actor James Carrick.

Carrick said: “It was a great night, spoilt only by some bloke who wobbled on to the stage clutching a large whiskey to collect his award. That was me!”

The show, about society’s outliers, was directed by Kristof Haines and featured a 14-strong ensemble cast. Carrick played a squatter. He later went on to stage his own solo show.

Company Theatre’s next show, The History Boys, written by British playwright Alan Bennett, will be staged in May.