3 December 2019 – 8 March 2020
Long Gallery
The Eden Arts residency at Karekare House was launched at the end of 2017 and has been home to four artists in 2019 – Lyn Bergquist, Belinda Griffiths, Alan Ibell and Judy Darragh.
The West Coast has long been an inspiration to artists and the residency offers artists a tranquil environment in which to develop their practice, pursue new ideas and foster creative conversations with the local community and wider general public.
This show brings together four artists at differing stages of their career who have all spent periods of time this year creating art at the historic homestead close to Karekare Beach. Their work variously references the coastal landscape, light and moods, community, the history of the Watchman Rock and the legends informing the land, the silence and the weather, the relationship to place and the beauty yet sheer immensity of nature.
The Eden Arts Karekare House residency is offered by the Eden Arts Trust in partnership with the Karekare House Trust. Eden Arts is best known for its flagship event Artists in Eden Day, held every March in Mt Eden Village, proceeds from which have enabled the Trust to celebrate and support the arts for more than 30 years.
ARTIST STATEMENTS
BELINDA GRIFFITHS
Belinda’s current body of work, created during her artist residency at Karekare House, draws inspiration from her experience amongst the landscape of Karekare. Whilst there, Belinda took regular walks along the rugged coastline of Karekare Beach. Looking out over the vast horizon of dark sand or getting up close to the immense towering cliff faces, one gets a strong sense of nature’s timelessness, its permanence and its mystery.
Belinda’s work explores those quiet moments of reflection when we are presented with situations that are beyond our understanding or outside of our control. The landscape in these works serves as a metaphor for how we navigate those inner landscapes, feelings of uncertainty, vulnerability and awe.
Belinda Griffiths is a conceptual figurative artist based in Auckland, New Zealand. Working within the disciplines of painting and printmaking, her art explores the expressive power of the gestural mark. When coupled with depictions of the human form, this push and pull between mark and form has the potential to dig deeper and communicate something of the human experience that becomes more authentic, more visceral. Belinda's work is an ongoing exploration of that potential.
Belinda was the recipient of the Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Award in 2010 and The Estuary Artwork Award in 2013. She has been a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards, the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award, and the Adam Portraiture Award. Belinda's work is held in a number of private and public art collections, in New Zealand and overseas.
JUDY DARRAGH
Judy Darragh lives and works in Auckland and played a significant role in the development of Artspace, Auckland (now Artspace Aotearoa), the independent artist-run space Teststrip, Auckland, and Cuckoo. Her work is renowned for brightly coloured sculptural assemblages of found objects, recycled items, industrial materials, collage, photography, video, and poster art. Her practice came to prominence during the 1980s in an era of conspicuous consumption, into which Judy modelled an artist who expanded with our views of material consumerism. Her work displays a fondness for everyday objects that is witty and provocative. Judy has taught art at secondary and tertiary levels for the past 35 years and is co-editor with Imogen Taylor of Femisphere zine.
Lagoon was a five week project mid-winter 2019 involving the local community and the Lone Kauri School. The installation consisted of several hundred fluorescent forms made from paper, card and tinfoil attached to bamboo skewers. The Karekare locals helped install the work on the large green lawn; the composition was organic. It was a three hour process and a drone photographed the final work. It now exists only as a photograph.
ALAN IBELL
The works produced during Alan’s period of residency at Kakekare exemplify an ongoing process of reduction within his work. His current practice explores the ways in which painting can suggest a psychological narrative through the minimized use of figuration. This has led towards a more abstract perspective within his practice and recent outputs aim to situate the work at the point where figuration and abstraction intersect.
Where previously Alan’s works have often been inspired by subconscious landscapes, those produced during this period amalgamate features of the physical Karekare surrounds with those of dreamscapes and memory-scapes. Thus the house visited by the figure in A New Night Walk is at one and the same time the historic Karekare House; an imagined edifice from dreams (or nightmares); and the half-remembered Italian villas so prominent in the landscape around Assisi, where he spent time as an artist-in-residence in 2015. The work thus blurs levels of significance and planes of experience, nodding to the influence of Renaissance painters upon his practice in general and creating a deliberately surrealist viewing experience.
Alan Ibell (b. Christchurch 1983) currently lives and works in Auckland. He studied Painting at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin and spent several years in Melbourne before returning to New Zealand in 2016. His is represented by Sanderson Contemporary and since moving to Auckland in 2017 he has exhibited at the Pah Homestead, at Parlour Projects in Hastings, and as part of the Auckland and Sydney art fairs.
LYN BERGQUIST
“Karekare was a mystery. I had once been involved with a homage to the film The Piano on another feature film, so I knew that from the carpark to the waterline carrying a piano with three Russians was about two bottles of vodka each way.
I initially had thoughts of painting twisted kanuka, pohutukawa clinging to coastal cliffs, the cliffs themselves and the Karekare waterfall. The first day of the residency I walked the beach for a couple of hours and back taking photos along the way. All thoughts of coastal bush paintings left me and I fell in love with Paratahi Island, or ‘The Sibling That Strayed Too Far’.
My fascination with Paratahi Island developed from looking at the island from different angles which change the island’s appearance from a sugar-loaf to a menacing battleship protecting or blockading the beach.
In the landscape paintings I painted while at Karekare I have tried to capture the emptiness, isolation and broad expanse of the beach and there is also a fascination with the tidal patterns left in the sand. With each painting I tried to set myself a new challenge, for example painting detailed rocks, the sea and waves etc, so I was discovering some new techniques along the way.”
Lyn Bergquist held his first solo exhibition at Oedipus Rex Gallery in 1991 and exhibited annually until opting out of the Auckland gallery scene in 2005. He has participated in the annual Artists in Eden Day since 1995 and has completed many commissions and private sales since. His highly popular Buzzy Bee series developed his reputation for capturing kiwiana on canvas and his later exhibitions of European influence on landscapes of the Far North; of the Mahurangi coast; and his interest in New Zealand history have all contributed to bringing his works to the attention of art collectors in New Zealand and internationally. In August 2019 Lyn won a prestigious Colour Maestro Award from the Resene Total Colour Awards for his paintings from the Karekare residency.
