Entelechy: Great Women Artists

Entelechy Great Women Artists

Lonnie Hutchinson Aroha 2022

Launch Event Wednesday 21 February Guest speaker, Dr Kirsty Baker

6pm — 8pm

Baker is a writer, curator and art historian, currently working as a curator at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. Her writing on contemporary and historical art has been published widely, with a particular focus on the work of women artists. Her first book, Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa will be published with Auckland University Press in 2024.

Viewing Wednesday 21 February—Saturday 9 March Open Hours Monday—Friday 9am—5.30pm Saturday 11am—3pm Location Webb’s Gallery 23 Marion Street Te Aro Wellington 6011

Entelechy Great Women Artists

Mark Hutchins-Pond Specialist, Art mark@webbs.co.nz +64 4 555 6011

Text by Alison Bartley

Virginia Woods-Jack Exhibition Manager +64 22 679 8664 virginia@webbs.co.nz

Jacqueline Fahey, Grandma and Emily, 1992

Artists Gretchen Albrect Tanya Ashken Mary-Louise Browne Joyce Campbell Bronwynne Cornish Jacqueline Fahey Lonnie Hutchinson Emily Karaka Yuki Kihara Gerda Leenards Marie Le Lievre Neke Moa Julia Morison Anne Noble Ann Shelton Elizabeth Thomson Lisa Walker

The proceeds of sales in this exhibition will go directly to artists as per primary market practice

Images copyright of the artists, and texts Alison Bartley

Introduction — Alison Bartley Guest Curator

Alison Bartley, who has a background in art history and media and communications, has been involved in the art world since the mid 1990s. She closed her gallery Bartley & Company Art in mid 2023 and is now engaged in a range of curatorial and writing projects.

Entelechy is about the realisation of innate potential. This wonderful, ancient and arcane word brings together with huge efficiency, an enormous, a timeless, and inherently political, concept that provides the framework for the artists in this exhibition.

Entelechy here is a celebration and a sampler of established and senior women artists working across a range of media, throughout Aotearoa.

In 1971 Linda Nochlin wrote the famous essay, Why have there been no great women artists? Fifty years later in 2022, Katy Hessel published The Story of Art without Men. In that halfcentury, we have become so much more aware of how women have been rendered invisible and written out of history. That has not happened to the women in this exhibition. However, despite major remediation efforts in recent decades, women, and particularly non-European women, or non-binary people have consistently received less attention. There is now substantial research evidence showing women are under-represented in gallery exhibitions and collections. They also generally receive lower prices than their male peers.

Additionally, art history has come to be seen as a Western construct and now, in Aotearoa as elsewhere in the world, it is working to be broader and more inclusive of all ethnicities and genders.

As the entelechy of the acorn is to become the oak, it is clear that entelechy is dependent on environment. For these women artists, the historical period in which they have worked has helped. The 1970s were undoubtedly a turning point when the so-called second wave of feminism hit this country generating a newly empowered quest by women for equality. The artists in this exhibition track a long social history and the change in roles of women in that time. Jacqueline Fahey, born in 1929, training and wanting to be an artist in the 1950s exemplifies the sheer, bloody-minded determination required then to be an artist and

a mother in that era of strictly defined roles for men and women.

The exhibition includes women born before the 1950s, those born in the 50s who became adults in the exciting, for women, 1970s,and those who were children in the 70s and grew up with the, then, radical idea that ‘girls can do anything’. They have succeeded.

For wahine Māori, the struggle for self-realisation is even harder and always entwined with the fight for Māori rights.

This has always been related to whakapapa. Some years ago Lonnie Hutchinson gave me this definition of whakapapa:

Whakapapa accounts for the way in which the earth, sky, oceans, rivers, elements, minerals, plants, animals and all people have been created. All things are linked through whakapapa, as well as having their individual place in the world. Ultimately, it is whakapapa that connects people to each other, to their ancestors, to the land, to the oceans and the universe.

Enetelechy applies to all living creatures: whakapapa, and the emerging idea of ecological kinship (an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin) is a dominant theme across the work of more than half the artists in this exhibition Art seeks to make meaning of the world — whether interior or actual worlds — and we see the artists here looking to mythology, to ancestors, the pre-anthropocene world, things invisible. A suggestion in response to Julia Morison’s work written by Wystan Curnow, in pre-internet 1991, can now be seen to apply to many artists: If it composes a requiem for discourses of belief that … have long lost their authority, it attempts to fashion from their remains a new discourse which may somehow serve the present moment.

We see artists here challenging and asking wideranging questions not just about the challenges facing the world and planet, but about how we read and interpret art; about what art is and can be, about how it shapes how we see, by excluding or including. Across the exhibition, we see a positive statement about art’s place in the world as activism, as a force to expand the way we feel and think about things and to engender change.

These women have shown resolution, perseverance, hard work and self-belief — the latter not always an easily acquired trait for women, in the face of partriarchal gaslighting.

As a believer in art’s social, cultural and political powers, I salute these artists who for decades have been making art with integrity, courage and in pursuit of entelechy.

Alison would like to thank Gow Langsford Gallery, Hamish McKay, Page, Season, and Two Rooms. The exhibition would not have been possible without their support.

Gretchen Albrect

With her distinctive use of large hemispherical and oval canvas, overlaid with gestural swathes of rich colour, Gretchen Albrecht (b.1943) is one of Aotearoa’s most well-known and recognisable abstract painters.

Geometric stretchers, stained canvas and swirling brushstrokes constitute her signature. Her curved stretcher forms, while not used exclusively, have been part of her language since the 1980s. She has described them as having “a sensuousness and a female-relatedness that I can’t describe in any other way”.

Albrecht’s paintings are an abstraction of the world she sees around her. They often reference the history of art and European painters. For example, the magnificent 3m wide hemisphere in this exhibition references Goya’s famous 1805 Portrait of Doña Antonia Zárate and its rich colours. Albrecht had seen the painting in Ireland and has a postcard of it on her wall for many years. y preoccupations roam unfettered and alight upon M things in an uncalculated way. Paintings come into focus, seemingly invisible until you ‘need’ to see them — the little postcard of Doña Antonia… is an example. I do not really see paintings in their historical periods. If I respond to an artwork it is because it speaks to me, and seems fresh and vital and meaningful and absolutely necessary to enter my life at that moment.

Albrecht’s, first solo exhibition, in 1964 the year following her graduation, was opened by Colin McCahon and since then she has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and internationally.

Her work is held in major New Zealand and Australian public collections including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery. In 2000, she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting. In 2002 the Auckland Art Gallery mounted the large-scale exhibition, ‘Illuminations: a 23 Year Survey of the Hemispheres and Ovals’. She is the subject of several major publications

1 Gretchen Albrecht

Beneath the Sun’s Golden Breath 2021 1460 × 2000mm acrylic and oil on canvas 2 parts price $95,000 courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms

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Gretchen Albrecht After Goya ‘Antonia’ 2021 500 × 3000mm acrylic and oil on Belgian linen price $150,000 courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms

Tanya Ashken

Tanya Ashken (b 1939), is best-known in New Zealand as a modernist sculptor with her most well-known work, the 3.5m high Albatross (1986) permanently sited in a prominent poisition on the Wellington waterfront.

In 1967, Ashken was the second artist to be awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and spent a year in Dunedin developing works for large sculptures. Her works may be made from steel and cement, cast in bronze or aluminium, or carved out of stone or wood. She is still producing work with many of her recent works cast in bronze from older work.

Brâncuși, one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century, has been a key influence since she first experienced his work in Paris in 1960. Ashken’s work is abstract although it may reference forms in the world such as the sea birds that are part of her life on the waterfront at Island Bay. Her forms are simple, elegant and organic.

Originally trained in London as a silversmith, and as a jeweller in Paris, Ashken migrated to New Zealand in 1963 with her New Zealand artist husband John Drawbridge. Like many artists who move into bigger work from jewellery, she does not draw a distinction between her jewellery and her sculpture, seeing jewellery as small sculpture that can be worn.

She has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and examples of her work feature in churches, public place and private and public collections.

3 Tanya Ashken Luna 2019 patinated cast bronze, edition 6/9 55 × 260 × 220mm price $25,000 (includes wooden base) courtesy of the artist and Hamish McKay Gallery

Mary-Louise Browne

A leading practitioner of text-based conceptual minimalism, Mary-Louise Browne (b 1957) is also a lover of objects and what she calls “the thinginess of things”. She has employed a wide range of media, from stone to leather, paper, glass and neon, to achieve her purposes.

Browne’s practice is primarily about the process of reading, seeing and comprehending the visual. It calls our attention to the role of language in articulating and registering what we see and experience. These issues are handled with a playful lightness and irony, with an overt delight in multiple connotations. In a global context her work may be seen alongside artists like Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Martin Creed In her most recent neon, Grand, medium, scale and reading tease conventional expectations and reference the word’s widespread ironic use in the Irish vernacular where any sense of magnificence is downplayed to simply mean ok.

I like the allusiveness that is earned by simplifying situations and expanding resonances through the concentration of language and pattern — the viewer being viewed and a participant in the process as in I am a camera.

Studying in the post-object height of the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in the early 1980s, and completing a Masters in Fine Arts, Browne majored in sculpture producing performance and installation works. Her interest in the performative power of words and use of found words, often drawn from song lyrics, movie scripts and theoretical writing, replicates conceptual art’s use of everyday objects.

Browne has an impressive history of exhibitions and commissions for permanent public art works such as Byword, a series of granite seats on Lorne St in Auckland, Font, a pool at St Patrick’s Square, in Auckland’s CBD, and the staircase Body to Soul in Wellington’s Botanical Gardens.

4 Mary-Louise Browne Grand 2022 neon, 250 × 1357 × 12mm price $9,500

5 Mary-Louise Browne I am a camera 2020 leadlight window 535 × 640 × 45mm price $6,000

Joyce Campbell

Joyce Campbell (b1971) is a photographic artist whose practice oscillates between documentation of the actual and the imaginary, primarily using traditional, antiquated, analogue technologies Campbell is concerned with the impact of industrial civilization on our planet and environment. She is interested in the intersection between art, science and philosophy, and the role art can play during a time of rapidly accelerating global environmental crisis. Thus, she sees her work functioning as “documentary, as activism and as divination”.

I am attempting to visualise an ecology that… is limited, damaged, injured and defiled, or resistant, volitional and responding with fury. To further my goals, I have found myself turning to the sacred, the visionary and the mythological.

The old technology generates images that are softer and foggier than the digital, often containing marks of dark room processes and emulsions. The result is visceral and mystical, beautiful and ghostly.

The images here are part of a recent new iteration of the LA Botanical series, first made in Los Angeles in 2007 when she was living there. The photographic prints are made from ambrotype portraits of plant species introduced to California for a variety of uses, which have since gone wild.

Campbell, works across photography, film, video and sculpture. She has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and internationally. Recent highlights include the 2019 survey exhibition On the Last Afternoon; Disrupted Ecologies and the work of Joyce Campbell and the associated publication of the same name; the 2016 Biennale of Sydney; the 2016 Walters Prize finalists exhibition at the Auckland and Christchurch art galleries; Heavenly Bodies, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2014; Che Mondo: What a World, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 2013. She is a Professor at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts.

6 Joyce Campbell Palm Heart 2008 / 2022 Hand printed gelatin silver fibrebased prints from Ambrotypes 1145 × 1565 mm framed Edition of 5 + 2 AP price $14,000 courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms

7 Joyce Campbell Datura Flower with Colored Aura 2008 / 2022 Hand printed gelatin silver fibrebased prints from Ambrotypes 1145 × 1565 mm framed Edition of 5 + 2 AP price $14,000 courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms

Bronwynne Cornish

Ceramic artist and sculptor Bronwynne Cornish (b 1945) is credited as one of the first clay artists to break through the hierarchies of art to show her work in a fine-arts rather than craft context. Pushing the boundaries of pottery traditions, she has earned recognition and critical acclaim for the conceptual content of her work, alongside its earthy materiality .

Cornish is interested in mythology, the pre-historic, symbolism, magic and ritual. She often explores the relationship between people and animals, either in blended forms or by imbuing a sense of anthropomorphism with animals given human expression and sensibilities. Ancient goddesses and deities appear often in the company of animals — such as Athena, Owl in this exhibition. Athena is the ancient Greek virgin goddess of wisdom who is often accompanied by an owl, renowned for seeing in the dark and also associated with wisdom and knowledge. The works seem to speak to the timelessness of much that is ancient.

I make work that I hope will create a certain atmosphere, ring a long-lost bell, and help people create their own mythologies… the pieces can be read and enjoyed on many levels Cornish has created many installations and large works.

In 2014-15, a major, 30-year touring survey of Cornish’s work, Mudlark, brought together four major series of works. Cornish’s work can be found in major public and private collections in New Zealand and abroad including The Auckland War Memorial Museum, The Dowse Art Museum, , The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Wallace Collection, and the Kobayashi Collection in Tokyo.

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8 Bronwynne Cornish Athena, Owl 2023 Earthenware slips 400 × 200 × 200mm price $3800

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Bronwynne Cornish My Creature 2023 Earthenware and slips 400 × 200 × 200mm price $3800

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Bronwynne Cornish Whenua 2021 Earthenware and slips 330 × 180 × 180mm price $2200

Jacqueline Fahey

Jacqueline Fahey (b 1929) has been painting the lives of women all her adult life and her work can be seen as a visual social history of women over the past 70 years.

Committed to being an artist since she was young, Fahey studied Fine Arts at the Canterbury College. After marrying in her mid-20s. On being told by male artist peers, that marriage was the end of being an artist, she became determined to mix painting work with family life. y brush became my sword and my palette a shield and M I determined I would go right back to work and do it in solitude.

Aiming to paint the world she knew, her subject initially was the “cloistered” lives of women in the 1950s who she has said were “bolted” to home and children. She coined the term suburban neurosis, even though it was frequently credited to her psychiatrist husband, and in the late 1950s produced a body of work with that title. Portraits of family, children, friends are shown amidst the paraphernalia, clutter, emotion, noise of real lives in domestic, suburban and more latterly urban environments. She has always painted in oils in rich colours and swathes of impasto. The work, primarily figurative, is vigorous, busy, colourful, stylised and surprisingly at times tending towards the surreal. There is frequently a play with spatial perspective.

Fahey’s mature style seen in The car as the erotic machine in the domain, or sacred and profane love where the the picture plane is divided by diagonal lines with each quadrant exploring different aspects of real, imaginary, dream, and even possibly psychedelic landscape. Distinctively, from the rest of her oeuvre, there are no people in this painting and the figure has to be imagined.

Her work, until recently denigrated as domestic, is now being appreciated as a statement of gender politics and as activism in the battle of women for equality. Her contribution to feminist art is recognised here and internationally, and two of her paintings were featured in the major exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She was awarded an ONZM, for services to the arts and is an Arts Foundation Icon.

Fahey’s paintings can be found in major public and private art collections across New Zealand

11 Jacqueline Fahey The car as the erotic machine in the domain, or sacred and profane love 1981—82 oil and glitter on canvas 1700 × 1700mm price $95,000 courtesy of the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery 12

Jacqueline Fahey Grandma and Emily 1992 oil on board 1003 × 740mm framed price $35,000 courtesy of the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery

Lonnie Hutchinson’s (b 1963) oeuvre has been described as “an exaltation of mana wāhine”1.

Hutchinson’s ancestry is Samoan, Māori (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kuri) Scottish and English and this rich mix is brought to play in her much acclaimed practice. Wāhine and whakapapa and the associated politics of gender and colonisation are her intertwined subjects. Cut-out works are her signature.

Made in a variety of media — most prominently heavy black builders paper but also vintage wallpaper, and, as in this exhibition, aluminium and steel — the cut-out works are threedimensional in their play with light and shadow. The shadows, which becomes part of the work, capture a non-materiality, a spirituality inherent in whakapapa and the Samoan notion of ‘va’, which refers to the space between places, things and people, and connections across time.

The use of steel has become more prominent since the success of her large 6m work on permanent display outside at the Britomart in Auckland. While motifs, such as the taro leaves, are often repeated, Aroha, is a new and more whimsical pattern made distinctive with its curved bottom line.

Hutchinson has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for three decades with work included in significant international exhibitions. A survey show, with accompanying catalogue, Black Bird: Lonnie Hutchinson 1997 — 2013, was shown in Auckland and Wellington in 2015. A major solo exhibition was held at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2021. Her work is held in many significant public and private collections in New Zealand and overseas and she has also produced several major site-specific and sculptural installations — most prominently for Hamilton Gardens, the Justice Precinct and the Convention Centre in Christchurch. In 2023, she won the CNZ Senior Pacific Artists Award. She currently has a major new work in Sculpture on the Gulf.

Lonnie Hutchinson

Dr Pounamu Jade Aikman, Art News Aotearoa, Issue 200

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13 Lonnie Hutchinson Aroha 2022 edition 3/6 powder-coated aluminium 1145 × 1330 × 95mm price $18,000

14 Lonnie Hutchinson Comb Taro Queen (Tiberius) 2022 edition 4/6 steel and automotive paint 230 × 250mm price $5,000

Emily Karaka, (b 1952), Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Kahu o Torongare), Waikato-Tainui (Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Te Kawerau ā Maki, Ngāti Tamaoho, Te Ākitai Waiohua, Ngāti Rori-Te Ahiwaru, Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Tahinga), is a senior artist who has been exhibiting for 45 years.

Seen as part of the first generation of contemporary Māori artists, Karaka paints about the worlds she knows.

Her subject matter relates to Māori land rights and Treaty of Waitangi claims and offers economic, social and environmental commentary. Formally, her painting draws on toi Māori and abstract expressionism. It is renowned for its strong colour, use of text and political and emotional intensity.

Emily Karaka

My imagery is cultural and traditional, but it is also contemporary and futuristic.

These paintings explore the notion of rāhui and Karaka connects Kauri dieback and the pandemic. She sees both as expressions of a natural world that is ailing and demanding a response from humans. The word rāhui is sometimes used to refer to the lockdown and Kawerau ā Maki rāhui is the ban that protects the forest by preventing people entering it and tracking the infectant causing the dieback. Rāhui at Taurarua; Kaitiaki at Mataharehare relates to a rāhui which aimed to prevent the construction of a memorial — to New Zealand’s ‘worst civil disaster’, the 1979 plane crash at Mount Erebus, Antarctica, on land with ancestral links. The central ghostly white pōhutukawa, refers to a large tree near the site of the proposed memorial and acknowledges the ancestral connection to the site.4 Karaka’s works are in many public and private collections such as Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui. Karaka was recently included in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, NIRIN (2020), and the landmark exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (2020— 21). She has a major survey show at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates later this year. [Both works shown here are scheduled for inclusion in the Sharjah exhibition. A comprehensive loan agreement will be provided to any party acquiring a work.]

Franics McWhannel, I bow my head, Emily Karaka’s Rāhui, 2021 https://francismcwhannell.com/?p=1378

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15 Emily Karaka

Rāhui at Taurarua; Kaitiaki at Mataharehare 2021 acrylic, oil and oil pastel on canvas 1830 × 1830mm price $27,500 courtesy of the artist and Season

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Kawerau ā Maki Rāhui; WRHA Act 2008 2021 acrylic, oil and oil pastel on canvas 1830 × 1830mm price $27,500 courtesy of the artist and Season

Yuki Kihara

Yuki Kihara (b 1975) is renowned for subverting the Western gaze, and ways of seeing, in terms of art history, gender and colonisation. Her project is to examine the often-sexualised and romantic representation of people of the Pacific and non-binary people — known in Samoa as fa’afafine. Her goal is a more equitable exchange between people and places Seen as a ground-breaking artist, Kihara, who is of Japanese-Samoan descent, was the first Pacific artist to represent New Zealand at a Venice Biennale. At the 59th Biennale in 2022, she staged the “super-luscious” exhibition, Paradise Camp, ‘upcycling’, to use her phrase, iconic Gauguin paintings restaged with fa’afafine.

Yuki’s rigour on the research side is compelling. But there is also this side to her work that is utterly camp, flamboyant and dazzling. Artists usually swing between the two: Yuki has the capacity to meld them. Natalie King, curator of the New Zealand pavilion at Venice.

In this brand new triptych, Kihara expands on her representation of gender non-binary people in the Pacific, through her ongoing exploration of Impressionism (pictured on the next page, far left), she reproduces unchanged Edouard Manet’s 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (the luncheon on the grass) and, on the right, a cropped version of Paul Gauguin’s, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 1897 — 98, which was set in Tahiti. In the middlesection, Kihara imposes the Tahitian couple from the front of Gauguin’s painting into Manet’s pastoral scene in order to highlight the uncanny resemblance between the two paintings and to suggest that Gauguin’s major painting may have been inspired by Manet’s painting.

Kihara moved to New Zealand at the age of 15 but has now lived in Samoa for more than a decade. Career highlights, apart from Venice, include amongst many others: a new iteration of Paradise Camp at the Powerhouse in Sydney 2023, the Gwangju Biennale, 2023, Aichi Triennale 2018, Bangkok Art Biennale 2017; Honolulu Biennial 2014; and a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2008.

17 Yuki Kihara Manet to Gauguin (after Manet and Gauguin) 2024 Edition 20 pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper 1516 × 460 mm price $4,500

Gerda Leenards

Gerda Leenards (b 1946) is renowned for paintings of etherial seascapes, landscapes, skies and weather reminiscent of the grand tradition of Dutch landscape painting, from the 17th century right through to early Mondrian Leenards was born in Holland and immigrated to New Zealand in 1956. She completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury but it was an artist residency in Elba, Nijmegen, Holland in 1990 that cemented her vital connection to the tradition of Dutch painting and the commitment to a depth of tone and atmosphere that has characterised her mature style.

An attachment to pristine and uninhabited environments was established early in her career and resulted in vistas devoid of any human markings, veering towards evocative deep, almost abstract essentials of form, free of extraneous detail.

Several of her expeditions to remote places and the resulting exhibitions have been the result of awards and grants. In 1989, she went to the Sub-Antarctic with artists Bill Hammond and Laurence Aberhart. Later she made eight trips to Fiordland which resulted in a large body of paintings shown in private and public galleries nationally. In 2007 and 2008, she received several Asia NZ grants to visit China to look at the distinctive karst limestone mountains, and developed large landscape installations which were exhibited nationally right through until 2022.

In her most recent series of work, focusing on treescapes, she has sought to weave concerns about climate change into her paintings looking at trees at the lungs of the earth.

Blue (for Gerda Leenards) Riemke Ensing This blue has nothing to do with darkness This blue is the magic of imaginings as if Rimbaud had just walked by whistling to rearrange the sky This blue is the colour of old Persian poems the sheen of silk whispering of ancient stories the wind in great sweeps gathering songlines of a remembered past

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Gerda Leenards Whispering blue 2016 acrylic emulsion on canvas 900 × 900mm price $9500

Le Lievre’s (b 1968) seemingly abstract paintings seek to represent a psychological inner reality. Her work, existing in the space between what is seen and what is felt, has been linked to that of the famous 20th century American abstract painter Agnes Martin, not for what is painted, but rather in terms of the parallels in looking to represent a distinctive female sensibility, and a sense of the spiritual. At the same time, it is knowing of art history and outward-looking seeking an emotional response in the viewer.

Titles serve to reveal a system of classification, her ascribing of archaeological typologies according to the characteristics of works. Typologies run like themes through her practice from the deep pools of oil covering the surface in Tomes, to the Notes where dense graphite drawing obscures much of the oil underpainting, and the Trays with their assemblages. Here, she shows her newest series Catcher where drawn lines, speaking to grids, nets and filters, are given equal weight with the oil paint.

Across all her work, a play with existential themes of chaos and order, along with consideration of the formal qualities of painting such as composition, colour and tonal values, speak to the creative process.

Marie Le Lievre

The artist wants to open the floodgates for the unconscious mind; to flow through with it, losing all trace of the petty and the daily and the necessary. Thus, the mind catcher itself is a thing in flux, rather than a static thing. It must dynamically shift in its sifting according to social constraints, to situation, to mental health, to disaster, to weather. This shifting is analogous to the way that MLL’s paint is in flux between its formal, abstract qualities and its leap into the concreteness of actual.5 Le Lievre has exhibited throughout New Zealand and in Sydney, Paris and Tokyo and her work is in private and public and collections. She has been a finalist in many art awards and her work has been written about extensively.

Rebeca Nash

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Marie Le Lievre Fix Catch (Net Let) 2023 oil, acrylic and graphite on canvas 137 × 137cm price $12,000 20

Marie Le Lievre Flag Ships (Net Let) 2023 oil and acrylic on canvas 137 × 137cm price $12,000

Neke Moa

Neke Moa (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Ahuriri, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Whare o Papaīra) operates at the forefront of body adornment and has won global critical acclaim for her work. Drawing on both customary processes and knowledge, and contemporary jewellery practice, Moa’s art, mahi toi, focuses on sharing stories of Māoridom and the role body adornment can play in creating a sense of empowerment and belonging to people and place.

I am trying to reconnect the spiritual lines that have been broken because our tohunga, our guides here on this physical earth, are affected by all the problems that Māori face: addiction, mental health, prison, poverty… Without healthy tohunga in the community, doing their work, the people suffer. This is what I see happening.

Every piece she creates — whether jewellery or wall sculpture/carving or combination — contains a traditional narrative of atua, gods and spirts from te ao Māori, documented by her partner Paula Conroy. Moa calls the installation of works shown here as tāoka.

Moa works primarily with pounamu often gifted to her, and materials found in Te Taiao (the environment) mainly at Ōtaki beach where she lives. She employs traditional techniques, such as hōanga (hand-held grinding stones), as well as using conventional jewellery tools. Her practice is conceived as a spiritual continuation of a whakapapa that extends back to Te Ao Kōhatu (The Age of Stone).

Having lived and taught in Fiji and Tonga, Moa is keenly attuned to Aoteaora’s place in the moana, the Pacific. Bone, stone, shell have been mantras of contemporary jewellery practice in this country and Moa says shell culture is growing.

“We are appreciating and valuing the shells, making lei, and wearing them every day, just as they do in the islands — because we are in the islands!”

Moa has a Bachelor of Applied Arts and her work is in major public and private collections throughout Aotearoa and overseas including Te Papa Tongarewa, Toi o Tāmaki/Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, the Dowse Art Museum and Tāmaki Paenga Hira/Auckland War Memorial Museum. She has exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions both in Aotearoa and internationally. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Herbert Hofmann Prize at Munich Jewellery Week and was a McCahon House artist-in-residence.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Hine Titama reoreo shells, paewai, rau, paua, fibre, niho mako price $2,800

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Tuakana Tū paewai(driftwood), pakohe, muka, paint price $3,200 Tūwhāriki along with the twins Tūmateaha and Tūmengataha are the most senior tuakana of the sisters that are collectively known as Tūmatauenga. They all were trained by Paipaīra and her daughter Hinemātauranga, who helped them develop their natural curiosities. Tūwhariki (pakohe) is charged with all the responsibilities that come with being the oldest. She oversees the comings and goings of the Atua, if called upon to decide, her word is law. The twins lead the charge into the unknown, identifying the need for change, meeting the challenges this brings and committing to the outcomes.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Hine Mātauranga paewai, paua, rau price $2,200 Hine Mātauranga created by Papaīra and Ranginui, Hine Mātauranga trained in everything Papaīra and Rangi had knowledge of, expanded all interests, and travelled beyond comfortable boundaries. Hine Mātauranga becomes the Atua of Patupaiarehe, her name changing to Hine Mātauranga ō nga mea maroiti katoa ō te aō — adapting small versions of herself to become known as small helpful beings across all cultures. She carries many names and develops knots for various uses like nets for fishing.

Hine Titama, an example of the strength required to undertake personal growth and change. Her journey is an extension of a story many in New Zealand are familiar with. Leaving Tane Mahuta was a hard and dangerous journey for her. Tane Mahuta was reluctant to allow her to leave, his response was one of violence, and rage.

Hine Titama reacted to this by creating her own whare, below the ground within the papakainga of Papatūānuku and Tane Mahuta.

The front door of the whare of Hine Titama, where wairua enter, is re-carved by Papaīra and the Whare Tū. The whare crossed the boundaries of the Papakainga of Papaīra, Tane Mahuta, and Papatūānuku. This is when Hine Titama became part of the whānau of Papaīra.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Rarōmia paewai, pounamu, muka, pupu rore shell, kohatu price $2,200 Rarōmia would be called on the spectrum if she was a human. She is hyper focused on her mahi at hand, that is the study of reptiles.

This fascination led her to the whare of Papaīra where she has her laboratory. She is an example of an Atua that is accepted and revered for her skills and passions.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Mātaaoho matanui(sandstone), kota shell, anga, beef bone, muka price $1,800

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Mātaaoho is the twin sister of Rakiwai, they live at either end of Aōtearoa. Mātaaoho lives in Rangitoto in Tāmaki. Matapoho decided to come to Aotearoa after being based in Hawaii and Tahiti; she was the first Atua to live here. She prepared for the arrival of people, deciding what was important in the form of pepeha.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Ruru kahurangi pounamu, beef bone, paint, muka price $2,800

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Rakiwai pakohe, bone, muka, paua, paint price $3,200 Rakiwai is a major Atua who watches over the most Southern part of New Zealand, residing on the highest point of Rakiura.

Rakiwai challenges Neke to use pakohe to not only create beautiful adornments, but to seed curiosity in others to re-indigenise the use of this taonga.

Ruru is a baby atua, finding her way in the world, abandoned and looked after by her sister, she finds a new mama and is learning her place in her whanau. This pounamu ‘floater’ is from the collection of John Edgar.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Hina and Rona Materials: Mother of pearl shell, bone, muka, paewai price $3,200 Hina represented by the carved pearl shell, floats above Rona, their connection through the bone whakairo. Their aroha for each other forever remembered by Hina as the most precious time of all.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Tāpui pakohe, muka, paint price $1,200

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Awatea paewai, muka, beef bone, raukrekau pounamu price $1,800 This waka travels through time and space, a vehicle for time travel.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Maumāpura pakohe, muka, paint price $1,100 This piece carries the sound of Pakohe being worked, within it. Resonating the desired strength required in bladed tools. It encourages us to hear the challenge thrown out and to understand that even the smallest contribution is important.

Tāpui is something earmarked for future greatness. This piece shows the raw pakohe, hung with muka, that has been worked to enhance its beauty. Kaitāpuhi has the skills to see the potential within things, that others may not notice at first glance. Revisiting, multiple approaches and time.

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Neke Moa Ingoa: Taukohe pakohe, dyed muka, paint price $1,200 The moving away from pakohe to metal meant that traditional specialised tools of survival stopped being valued, traded, used and passed on within whanau, lost heirloom pieces. This process has not erased the qualities of colour, texture, strength, grain, density within the stone.

courtesy of the artist and Season

Julia Morison

Almost 50 years after her first exhibition Julia Morison (b 1952) is operating at the height of her powers. Her current exhibition at City Gallery Wellington, Ode to Hilma is a massive and mesmerising response to Hilma af Klint’s The ten largest paintings shown at City Gallery Wellington in 2022. Morison has said her interest in af Klint lies ‘in the search for spiritual symbolism as a shared language’.

I share her interest in the traditional structures and myths that we use that may be part of our collective unconscious or DNA memory.’

Morison has pursued her interest in art’s power to convey symbolic meaning across a wide range of media, including painting, photography, sculpture and installation. A highly original and inventive artist, her practice and work is arcane and mystical, accessible and mysterious, familiar and surreal.

These works are from Omnium Gatherum (meaning: a miscellaneous collection) which is an ongoing series of work which Morison has produced annually since 2015. The works playfully pull together disparate threads to create a kind of pictionary of her diverse practice. Geometric grids, lines and vines provide a fertile ground to contain, hold and spawn new form, life and colour, varying from year to year. Defying categorisation, there is a sense of fecundity and fun, visual pleasure and intellectual intrigue.

Since her first exhibition, Morison has never had a year without one, with solo exhibitions in public and private galleries throughout New Zealand and internationally. She is the recipient of many key awards, grants and residencies including the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1988 and the Moet & Chandon Fellowship in 1990, which gave her a year’s residency in France and led to her living there for a decade. She is an Arts Foundation Laurate and has an ONZM for services to the arts.

In 2005 a major retrospective a loop around a loop, was shown at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu and in 2006 at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. The accompanying book remains the definitive publication on her work.

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Julia Morison Omnium Gatherum 75 2022 ochre and mixed media on board 1000 × 700mm framed price $22,000

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Julia Morison Omnium Gatherum 80 2022 silver leaf and mixed media on board 1000 × 700mm framed price $22,000

Anne Noble

Since 1980 when her Wanganui River images first captured national attention, Anne Noble (b 1954) has created highly acclaimed bodies of work that mark sustained engagement with particular places, sites, histories, issues and more recently species.

Her most recent projects are concerned with the nonhuman world and human impacts on natural biological systems.

Her six-year engagement with the honeybee centred on their intimate physiology and their contemporary predicament in the light of escalating environmental stresses. She often works with scientists and researchers and the Bee Portraits shown here were made when she was given access to an electron microscope. “The images,” she says, “articulate the delicate majesty of these beings.” The many components of her project including a living beehive, housed in ‘a cabinet of curiosities’ (first shown in France) was shown at the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane in 2018-19). Conversātiō: In the Company of Bees (Massey University Press) documents the trajectory Noble’s bee projects.

More recently she has been considering the complexity of the forest as she did a hive of bees, reflecting on the forest as a complex living system, rather than individual trees. Seeking new ways to visualise the invisible connectivity and communication between trees, and to make the images shown here, she walked in the forest at night wearing hunters’ cameras.

I am interested in exploring these invisible interconnected biological networks, and the imagined presence of forces and light that exist beyond human vision Anne Noble has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and her work is held in collections throughout the world. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 31st Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award (2015), a Fulbright Fellowship at Columbia College, Chicago (2014), and US National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Award (2008). She is a Professor Emerita Fine Arts Photography at Massey University, ONZM, Arts Foundation Laureate Award.

Dead Bee Portrait #13 has been selected for inclusion in a French survey of women photographers coming out later this year.

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Nocturnal Assembly #11, 13, 15 pigment on Canson Baryta paper 610 × 395 mm, edition 7 price $12,000 for triptych / $4,500 ea.

Anne Noble Dead Bee Portrait #2 2015 pigment on Canson Baryta paper, edition 10 425 × 515 mm (framed) price $5,500

Anne Noble Dead Bee Portrait #13 2015 pigment on Canson Baryta paper, edition 10 425 × 515 mm (framed) price $5,500

Ann Shelton

Ann Shelton (b 1967) makes large‑scale images that investigate the social, political and historical contexts that shape readings of nature. Built on foundations of deep research, Shelton’s practice challenges the traditional convention of photography that what you see is the subject — in her work what is visually absent is as important as what is present.

The works here come from Shelton’s latest series i am old phenomenon. This body of work explores beliefs about the medicinal, magical and spiritual uses of plant materials, which were well established in the lives of European forest, nomadic and ancient peoples. Much of this knowledge was held by wise women, witches and wortcunners and was forcibly supplanted as pagan practices were displaced across Europe and other continents in the wake of Christianity and the rise of capitalism.

These works signal a rupture that has taken place that has distanced us economically and spiritually from our environment and ultimately led to our current crisis.

— Ann Shelton i am an old phenomenon shows Shelton not only as an artist and researcher but also as a gardener and forager. She constructs all her plant assemblages and increasingly grows many of her own plants.

The loss of the oracle is on the cover of the current Landfall magazine, along with other images from the series and a linked story Shelton commissioned from award-winning writer Pip Adam.

Shelton is about to have her first solo exhibition in a public gallery in the United States showing an expanded version of this series. worm, root, wort…& bane opens at Alice Austen House in New York in March. A new artist book about the ongoing series will be launched at the same time. Shelton has an MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. A major review of two decades of Shelton’s practice — Ann Shelton: Dark Matter — showed at Auckland and Christchurch Art Galleries from 2016 — 2018.

40 Ann Shelton The loss of the oracle (Cornflower, Bluebottle, Hurtsickle, Bachelor’s Buttons, Bluebow, Blue Cap) 2023 archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Bamboo, framed, edition of 6 + 2 Aps 1160 × 880mm price $10,500

41 Ann Shelton Shine even into its darkest winter (Fly Agaric) 2022 archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Bamboo, framed, edition of 6 + 2 Aps 1160 × 880mm price $10,500 42 Ann Shelton Shine even into its darkest winter (Fly Agaric) 2022 qrchival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Bamboo, framed, edition of 6 + 2 Aps 1160 × 880mm price $10,500

For over three decades, the art of Elizabeth Thomson (b 1955) has engaged with issues to do with science, imagination, culture and, increasingly, what it means to live in the South Pacific region in the 21st century. Her works attest to a life-long commitment to grappling with natural and human histories, fuelled by poetic imagination as well as assiduous research, field-work and long hours in the studio. The resulting works ask such fundamental questions as: How does humanity fit within the broader realm of nature; and to what extent are we are a part of, or distinct from, our environment? Thomson brings us into such intimate engagement with the molecules, cells and minutiae that are the basis for human life while, at the same time, making us aware of the broader forces and patterns of life on planet earth and beyond.6 Khaos, the large tondo shown here, is part of Thomson’s body of work Lateral Theories — an encounter between the visible planet we know and the invisible planets that exist within, beyond or alongside our own. Khaos, the first of the primordial gods/godesses to emerge at the dawn of creation, means gap or chasm being the space between heaven and earth.

The white Relativity… work engages with ways of seeing and the materiality of speculation and art-making.

Elizabeth Thomson has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and abroad. A major survey exhibition, My hifi my sci-fi opened at City Gallery Wellington in 2006 then toured nationally. Cellular Memory: a survey exhibition 1989— 2017 opened at Aratoi, and toured nationally until mid 2023.

Alongside the work of Len Lye, her art featured in the major two-person exhibition, Waking up slowly, at the Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, in 2018

Elizabeth Thomson

The words describing Elizabeth Thomson’s practice and works draw on Gregory O’Brien’s writing and, as they couldn’t be bettered, are reused here.

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Relativity and the Structure of Things — After Braque 2018 cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel 1400 × 2265 × 50mm price $52,000 courtesy of the artist and Page

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Lateral Theories — Khaos 2021 cast vinyl film, lacquer on fibreglass and resin form 2000mm diameter × 295mm price $60,000 courtesy of the artist and Page

Lisa Walker (1967) has been described as one of New Zealand’s most internationally successful jewellers. Without abandoning the medium’s essential connection to the body and its role as adornment, which to quote an early exhibition title may be Unwearable, her pieces and installations demand the work is viewed, read and examined as fine art.

Iconoclastic and irreverent, Walker challenges traditional notions about jewellery, and questions what it is and can be.

Mobile phones, an anatomical hand, and sweepings from her workshop floor are just some of the everyday things she uses to transform traditional understandings of jewellery through her open, yet rigorous approach. Aesthetics, materiality, and preciousness have occupied Walker over the years, and her jewellery journey has taken her from New Zealand to Munich and back again. Experimental and unsettling, Walker’s jewellery explores relationships to art, culture, and society — ‘everything is food for art’.7

Lisa Walker

Just because it’s jewellery it doesn’t mean we have to clam up and be well-behaved.

— Lisa Walker Walker uses a vast range of materials and construction methods that are far removed from her early gold-smithing days.

The works here draw on textile and stitching traditions in their materiality but also clearly indicate their link to jewellery.

Trained in jewellery at the Otago Polytechnic (Dunedin School of Art) and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich where she lived for 15 years, Walker has exhibited widely in Europe where she has won major awards including the prestigious Francoise van den Bosch Award. In 2015, she received an Arts Foundation Laureate Award and in 2022 an ONZM for services to jewellery.

Justine Olsen, ‘Lisa Walker, New Zealand’s jewellery provocateur’, Lisa Walker, New Zealand’s jeweller provocateur | Te Papa, accessed 13 February 2024

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A drawing on the way to woven hands 2023 fabric, stuffing, acrylic, paint, thread 670 × 200 mm price $4,000 courtesy of the artist and Hamish McKay Gallery 46 Lisa Walker

Woven hands 2023 fabric, stuffing, acrylic, paint, thread, steel compound 620 × 200 mm price $4,000 courtesy of the artist and Hamish McKay Gallery 47 Lisa Walker

A combination of several things including the radio and Dirk’s figure 2023 fabric, stuffing, acrylic, paint, thread, steel compound 590 × 350mm price $4,000 courtesy of the artist and Hamish McKay Gallery

23 Marion Street Te Aro Wellington 6011 +64 4 555 6001 webbs.co.nz