"Settled in the Soil" [2017]
National Contemporary Art Award - Waikato Museum
This work has a social and political context for me, and speaks of my relationship with Aotearoa.
Walking the English countryside I would often find pottery shards. These ceramic fragments link to the past and are a glimpse of history, fashion and social behavior.
Aotearoa reveals a different story for me.
Fewer shards and historical remnants exist. However, instead, I mostly unearth domestic cattle bones, provoking me to consider the huge impact Europeans and colonialisation have had on this land, and the consequent changes to the landscape through farming.
Decorated with rose motifs, the Bones are a metaphor for English crockery, and a link to the imported daily rituals of tea drinking from the motherland.
Having felt my own personal fragmentation from immigrating I use my work as a way of combining my world with another.
“Whatungarongaro te tangata, toitū te whenua” – People come and go, the land remains.
Light Cabinet [2011]
Turned plaster objects, wire objects, and lighting within a wooden cabinet.
Vonney Ball MA [2009]
Studio Documentation : Hook
My interest in learning Te Reo and in Maori art has led me to appreciate the beautiful carved matau or fish hooks which became thematic in my series 2 Collage works. I progressed the hook shape from a two dimentional motif into a 3 dimentional plaster form. My background in ceramics and surface decoration therefore progressed into introducing 'pattern' by way of projecting moving image onto the form. Juxtaposing the organic hook form with abstract, geometric, grid imagery parallels the overlapping of Maori culture and my European heritage.
Look @ Artweek [2016]
The wire form is a complementary piece to the Artemesia lidded urn. The relationship between these pieces lies in the development of an idea, and the making.
Sketching is the design process I use that helps formulate ideas; wire has a conceptual aesthetic, similar to the drawn lines in my sketches. For me, seeing the wire construct allows me to reconsider the form internally and externally.
Ideas mull in my head, like a lone light bulb in a darkened room.
"The Indigestable Truth" [2016]
Created for the "Between the Tides exhibition" Sunday 17th April 10am - 3pm, Westmere Beach. Made from wire and beach rubbish.
2050 x 1100 x 2700
"Memory Lapse" [2011]
This is a documentation of the exhibition "Memory Lapse" (Carlina Goffe Gallery). The project was based on the ideas around memory and experience. I am interested in how we evolve over time, and how our continual layering of experiences and influences can be represented or catalogued. By proposing to represent this 'layering' with found and made objects, the exhibition comprised of lightboxes, prints of stills from moving imagery (not shown) and the objects themselves, incorporating light, which was triggered by sensor when the viewer entered the gallery space.