Art Associates Aotearoa –

`Let there be spaces in your togetherness… ‘ Kahlil Gibran

19 November – 13 December

Sarah Anderson
Environmental response underpins Sarah Anderson’s practice.
Drawing is usually the starting point for recording, observing and exploring
ideas derived from observations of the natural world. Narrative hypotheses
are invented, and imagination guides her work in whatever direction best
serves each project, utilising multiple disciplines including drawing, painting
and performance.

Susanne van Tuinen
My work explores the transformative potential of aluminium, a material that
captivates me with its remarkable flexibility. This quality allows me to
transcend its flatness and shape it into new, three-dimensional forms. I
consistently experiment with various shapes, often with a particular emphasis
on curves. The gentle, calming quality of the curve invites contemplation.
Each piece serves as a dialogue between material and emotion, as well as an
interplay of form and space.
Through these works, I invite viewers to experience the shift and revitalisation
that emerges from reimagining the familiar.

Viv Kepes
Developing a love of the outdoors from an early age, I draw extensively on the
natural world in my paintings and enjoy rendering organic forms found in
nature. Allowing figurative aspects to dissipate into atmospheric haze, my
work becomes an immersive experience about intimate details from the
natural world. They are painterly, sensory experiences about the colour and
beauty of small organic structures.
These works grew following wanderings on friend’s farms. Springtime scents
from the little Tūmatakuru/Matagouri blooms are intoxicatingly sweet. Each
blossom is like tiny treasure hidden within the branches of these old, wild and
thorny, native divaricating shrubs. The embroidered work celebrates the
delicate, minute blossoms of Carmichaelia corrugata, our SI endemic
‘Threatened-Nationally Vulnerable’ native dwarf broom.

Lee Harper
BCA (Hons.), Dip Art, Craft & Design

Speckled space, wrung from the hands of a maker, observes junctions of
inequity in the placement of small and delicate cloth pieces. Art exalts the
perfection of ‘mastery’, amongst paint and sculpture, yet cloth works amongst
others, are perceived as unworthy.
These works revel in their insolence, seeking out others in a galleria to toil
alongside. Made without devices of measure, the artist attempts to create “…
an exactness, a perfection which only becomes smothered by the need to
merely, ‘let the object be’ .”

Nicola Thorne
Early morning cloud rolls over the Port Hills from Õtautahi – Christchurch,
spreading across Whakaraupō – Lyttelton Harbour, shrouding the trimaran,
Bach, moored in Te Wharau – Charteris Bay.

Karen Greenslade
As my elderly female relatives died, I chose to keep some of their beautiful
scarves as mementos, and I created a series of large canvases to celebrate
these memories. These scarves were inevitably floral and represented the
cottage garden flora contained in so many NZ gardens of the time. Each scarf
my grandmother, Berta, owned belonged to an ensemble of dress, hat and
shoes which she would wear to walk downtown to do her shopping several
times a week. Such fond memories.
This work however also represents the complexity of our feelings to the past
attitudes of our early relatives. The work includes not just fragments of Berta’s
roses but also the leaves of the east coast houhere tree and traces of fracture
marks from stones found in rivers and beaches which represent the formation
of our land. An allusion to an earlier New Zealand, which today Berta would
certainly have appreciated.

Stephanie McEwin
We, ourselves, right now, literally exist as human aggregates. clustered
together in apartments, streets, jobs, cities, beaches, families, shopping malls
etc, trying to make sense of it all and get along.
In a highly manipulated world space, engineered to polarize us on every level,
I continue to paint us wonderfully," better together".
This work depicts a random beach crowd executed in two mediums;
Oil on Canvas and lyrical stitch on linen.
The figures are sourced from varieties of images previously unconnected but
randomly selected together in the work.

Mi Kyung Jang
Mi Kyung Jang explores humanity’s intertwined relationship with nature in the
Anthropocene. Growing up in rural South Korea, she formed a lasting bond
with the natural world. Through textured impressions of bark, rocks, and
organic surfaces, her works poetically reflect nature’s fragility and invite quiet
reconnection with the environment.