Wellington based photographer & documentary maker Bruce Foster has produced some fantastic short videos from his interviews with each of the artists after the Kermadec trip. Some great insights into the artists as the reflect on the trip and Kermadec region.
Make sure you go full screen … they are worth seeing big.
These videos are showing at the current exhibition in the Tauranga Art Gallery.
To accompany the exhibition Tauranga Art Gallery and Pew have produced a stunning 144page hardback book featuring the work of all nine artists that went to Raoul Island in May.
The book launched this Monday at 6pm. Unity Books, 57 Willis Street, Wellington. Come along and meet the artists. Unity Books website $40 NZD of arty goodness!
If $40 is a bit rich for your liking you can also read about the Kermadec voyage in the summer edition of ArtNews.
The Kermadec exhibition has finally had it’s official opening at Tauranga Art Gallery.
The evening went really well with all nine artists, our fellow seariders, friends and supporters present along with a couple of hundred guests. Oh yeah … there was some bloody nice work there too.
Images from the 2007 series “My long white cloud” are now available in the “for sale” section of the site.
You can also see them as a large slideshow here.
Although they been displayed before there are a couple of new additions to the set.
From the Tauraga Art Gallery website:
Summer visitors to the Tauranga Art Gallery will be among the first in the world to see work in a significant new exhibition, Kermadec.
Kermadec is an exhibition of all-new work by nine South Pacific artists, inspired by a unique expedition along the Kermadec Trench. It features work by artists including Te Puke-born Dame Robin White, Wellington-based poet and artist Gregory O’Brien, sculptor Elizabeth Thomson, and installation artist John Reynolds.
Completing the line-up are printmaker and novelist John Pule, photographers Jason O’Hara and Bruce Foster, inter-media artist Phil Dadson, and acclaimed Australian artist Fiona Hall.
The artists travelled on board the HMNZS Otago to one of the least known wilderness areas in the world. The Kermadecs, located between New Zealand’s North Island and Tonga, is home to a diverse range of wildlife and marine life, and also has a series of underwater volvanoes and a deep-sea trench. Tauranga plays first host to the exhibition as it is the closest public art gallery to the Kermadec Trench.
Gallery Director Penelope Jackson says in light of recent events around the Rena stranding, the exhibition offers a more positive angle about the ocean, which is quite literally at our back door.
“This is not just an exhibition of pretty pictures of the South Pacific but rather showcases how a group of contemporary artists were inspired and affected by their voyage. Each of them has taken the South Pacific to a different level, whether it is Elizabeth Thomson looking at the micro worlds on Raoul Island or Dame Robin White’s tapa cloth that tells, in part, the stories of migration.”
Artist Gregory O’Brien says the trip in May was intense.
“It was rough and noisy and busy. Everyone was working pretty much every second of the way. The intensity of it was surprising,” he says.
The artists involved were a dynamic, diverse and positive group of people.
“What’s going to make it a great show is that it has very diverse ingredients and characters, kind of like the ingredients for a really good soup.”
The Kermadec Initiative is a project of the Global Ocean Legacy programme of the Pew Environment Group. As a supporter of the artists’ voyage and exhibition, The Pew Environment Group is looking to raise awareness about one of the greatest, least known, natural ocean wilderness areas on the planet.
“We took artists to the Kermadecs so they could experience its scale, see its surface and imagine the diversity of its depths,” said Bronwen Golder, director of Pew’s Kermadecs Initiative.
“I watched the artists gather impressions and emotions from the Kermadec ocean and its islands, and with them, begin to conjure words and images.”
Kermadec opens in full to the public on Saturday 19 November and runs through until Sunday 5 February 2012.
The Generator Shed. Raoul Island 2011
Photographic print 307 x 463mm
Like a church glowing in the evening light the generator shed is conceivably the only source of light for hundreds of kilometers (although the main house has it’s own generator). It also doubles as the islands museum. For sale
Crucible #2 2011
Photographic print 307 x 463mm
The wreck of the Kinei Maru on Roal’s Denham Bay – sits like some oversize Len Castle sculpture. The egg shell hull of the ship cracked open and cast aside. For sale
The exhibition in Tauranga opens next week – and this triptych will be my main piece in the show. Three large Lambda digital master photographic prints it represents the way the railings of the deck formed the windows that were nonexistent on the ship. It is now for sale in the updated “for sale” section of the site. I will be adding more works there over the next few weeks. If you have seen something you like on the site but can’t see it listed for sale just contact me.
A 5 minute slideshow of photographs taken on the Kermadec trip.
In 1875 Tom Bell, his wife and six children moved to live on remote Roaul Island (then Sunday island). The family lived on the island in almost total isolation for 35years enduring incredible hardship at times.
After visiting Roaul and reading of the family (in a book called “The Crusoes of Sunday Island”) I was deeply moved and decided to create this shot to tell the story of the oldest child “Hettie Bell” who lived in isolation for the best years of her life.
She wears period clothes and holds a ‘bouquet’ of seaweed to represent her ‘marriage to Roaul’. This photo was shot with a homemade lens with glass from a 100year old camera on a Nikon D300s to further add to historic link.
It was shot on Breaker Bay Beach in Wellington which bears a striking similarity to Roual Island’s Denham Bay. Using my daughter Lauren to model seemed even more approprate because when I heard Hettie’s story it instantly made me think of her. I think she did a great job of capturing the quiet determination that Hettie must have had.
The Kermadec artists all spoke at City Gallery in Wellington last week. It was a great success with a talk to school groups in the afternoon and invited guests in the evening. It was fantastic to see everyone again (this the the first time the full “Kermadec 9″ have been together since the trip).
Our sponsor Pew produced a small book as a precursor to the the exhibition at Tauranga Art Gallery in November (download it as a PDF here). It features artist statements and work in progress.
