RANGE & Tessellations
Kia ora friends and family,
RANGE opened in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland last Friday. We had a fun and energising series of days with most artists meeting for the first time in person after almost a year of meeting online. Thursday was installation day, Friday we opened, and Saturday we held an artist panel talk ‘On Process in Practice’, followed by a week of visitors to the gallery and many rich, engaging discussions on handmade processes at a time when unmediated advances in tech threaten the human element inherent in almost everything we do.
We’ve had some great feedback about the show. Te Papa curator Lissa Mitchell described our show as not to be missed. Artist Judy Darragh claimed that when she walked into the gallery she could feel the warmth from all the sunlight hours in our work. Curator Paul Brobbel said ‘The highlight (of the Auckland Festival of Photography) was the RANGE exhibition at Eyes on Fire Gallery - a laboratory of experimental practice, chemistry and natural history.’
The three two-and-a-half-metre long works from my series Tessellations look great hanging on the gallery’s four-metre high wall. The show runs until June 17 — if you are in or near Auckland there’s still a chance to see the show. You can read more about the work here.
A few images from installation day (courtesy of Kate van der Drift) and opening night (courtesy of David Loughlin) and of our amazing collective of Art Photo School artists, brought together by the lovely Kate van der Drift. Kate’s been absolutely dedicated to helping us make this happen. She’s donated dozens of hours to the installation and documentation of our work, shooting artist portraits, and the many hours of editing required for still and video.
I’m a writer and an artist — every art project is also a writing project. I’ve been thinking about how best to share the writing aspect of Tessellations. Today I’m sharing field notes from a day of collecting plants and making cyanotype exposures back in November, when I was just beginning to think about botanical wallpaper. An excerpt is below:
Field Notes from Tessellations
Muehlenbeckia is the only species laid on on my freezer-top desk that’s native — a tangled mess of vines, climbing over itself, non-linear, delicate leaves and delicate stems, robust, vigorous, imposing, possessive. Echo of contour lines, of longitudes and latitudes tangled up in each other, a geopolitical mess, soup, tangle —
See the previous post to read the full day’s notes — Plant-Speak — if you have the time and inclination. I’ll be sharing more field notes from Tessellations throughout the duration of the show.
Field Notes from Tessellations
Thanks to everyone for their continued support of this work.
Much love & aroha,
AMB