Feast

Clay Benders

Claybenders showcases contemporary ceramics produced by student and graduates of Otage polytechnic Diploma of Ceramic Arts. This years theme feast, conjures up ideas of sumptuous banquets and festivals celebrating abundance, gratitude and the consumption of food and wine. For others the theme explores social, political and environmental issues. Clay invites a visual response and a tactile one and these artists have bought the power of their creativity to produce this exciting exhibition.

AFLOAT

Judith Lawson, Jana Wood, Milvia Romici, Penny Hacking

Disconnected, unearthed, floating. This show includes four artists and their responses to a time that feels like a strange in-between, it is confusing, both fleeting and tortuously slow. We are treading water, staying afloat, it is difficult to navigate. These works reflect a host of different, disparate feelings, a yearning for times before, to be connected, frustration, anxiety and fear, with moments of quiet joy in solitude, in noticing, being in nature, hope.

Craftsmen and Melancholy

Andrew Barns-Graham and Spid Pye

This exhibition explores two different approaches to portraiture by two different artists. One is a photographer and the other a painter. Pye has produced a series of self portraits as craftsman, different artisans whose stories seem steeped in history. From the industrial revolution to globalisations erasure of any clear finishing line, we have evolved the ability to manufacture bigger, faster, and cheaper. Pye asks what has been lost in the process, not the least of which is craft. Through the craft of painting, Barns-Graham has produced a similarly somber portrayal of the future of consumerism. These portraits of beautiful woman have an underlying melancholy about them. They seem just as uncertain of the future as Pye's self portraits.