Listen to Janet Bayly's interview on Frances Hodgkins, with Chris Laidlaw on the Sunday Programme, National Radio, Sunday 18 April 2010
www.cushycms.com/temporary_uploads/71718/sun-20100418-0840-Janet_Bayly-048.mp3

Press Release 

LIGHT: BLACK & SILVER

Based on the Real Art Roadshow Collection

OPENS Saturday 12 December, 5pm, All welcome.
With special guest Jill Trevelyan, Real Art Roadshow essayist and Rita Angus curator and biographer. Exhibition runs 13 December 2009- 31 January 2010

Mahara Gallery has been given the wonderful opportunity to curate a different show each summer drawn from the fabulous contemporary New Zealand art collection of the Real Art Roadshow Trust. This first show has been curated by Mahara Gallery Director Janet Bayly from the Trust’s Black and Silver Collections, with a focus on photography, extended by recent work by some of these and other artists. The work deals with the idea, material of, or associations with light, and ranges from photography and neon, through to painting, printmaking, ceramics and sculpture.

Artists include:
Laurence Aberhart, Wayne Barrar, Martin Basher, Victor Berezovsky, Sam Cairncross, Ben Cauchi, Chris Charteris, Octavia Cook, Shane Cotton, Maryrose Crook, Bill Culbert, Tony de Lautour, Siren Deluxe, Tony Fomison, Gary Freemantle, Megan Jenkinson, Darren Glass, Sarah Guppy, Patrick Hanly, Paul Hartigan, Ralph Hotere, Megan Hansen-Knarhoi, Richard McWhannell, Johanna Mechen, Anne Noble, Geoffrey Notman, Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Reuben Paterson, Andrew Ross, Helm Ruifrok, Neville Smitheram, Kate Small, Michael Smither, Bill Sutton, Roberta Thornley, Charles Tole, Robin White, Dean Venrooy, Gordon Walters, Toss Wollaston.

Light is a (non-material) medium of illumination which makes sight possible. In scientific terms, it is a form of electromagnetic radiation, which could be daylight, a candle, lamp, a bulb or neon, or a spark or flame. Light creates different colours and tones, through to white, which combines them all. Different qualities of light model form and texture, and an absence of light creates ambiguity or mystery, right through to black. In human terms, ‘light’ also refers to a mental understanding or insight, or a light-hearted and playful approach.

Mahara Gallery is open daily from 10am-4pm, closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day.
Sunday hours: 1-4pm, and on Public Holidays: December 28th and January 4th

20,000th Visitor to Gallery! 

Mahara Gallery recently celebrated a new record, it's 20,000th visitor for the 2008-09 year. Miss Mizuho Nishioka had attended the opening of Mirek Smíšek 60 Years 60 Pots on Saturday 20 June where she discovered that Mirek would be giving a floor talk at the gallery the following Wednesday. Having travelled from Wellington City for the event she was completely surprised and thrilled to discover she was the gallery's 20,000th visitor. She was presented with a special certificate, a Mirek Smíšek 60 Years 60 Pots Catalogue and poster and a selection of the gallery's cards and postcards.


 

Press Release: A new exhibition The Colour of Water, opens at Mahara Gallery.

Artist and patron of Mahara Gallery, Lady Hardie-Boyes, will open The Colour of Water at 5pm on Saturday 18 April. All are welcome.

The exhibition features works by famous early 20th century New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins, her sister Isabel Field, also an excellent painter, and their father, painter William Mathew Hodgkins.

These works have been kindly loaned for this exhibition by the Kapiti-based Field Collection Trust. They are joined by paintings by J.C. and D.K. Richmond, who were important to the story of Frances Hodgkins' development into one of New Zealand's best-loved artists.

We are pleased to also have two works loaned from the estate of Joanna Margaret Paul, whose Mahara Gallery-curated show of drawings is currently on at the Christchurch Art Gallery, the last of its tour of 14 venues around New Zealand.

These artists form the basis of a show which explores historical and contemporary approaches to water-based art in media such as watercolour, gouache and acrylic. There is also work whose content and ideas relate to water, including photography, sculpture and jewellery.

Other artists featured include Mary Zohrab - the professional artist’s name of Lady Hardie-Boyes - along with Wendy Masters, George Thompson, Vivian Manthel-French, Stewart MacKay, Peter Coates, Theo Janssen, Steve Myhre, Barney Flanagan, Neville Smitheram and Peter Ireland.

Contemporary photographer Anne Noble (Order of NZ Merit), Professor and Director of Research at Massey University's School of Fine Arts, is showing new work from her latest trip to Antarctica, in late 2008.

Rachael Rakena and Brett Graham have a photographic work from their installation representing New Zealand at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Their work Aniwaniwa responded to the flooding of a village on the Waikato River to create a new dam at Lake Karapiro, submerging its earlier human history. Photographic work by Andrew Ross, Catherine Russ, Janet Bayly, White’s Aviation and James Chapman-Taylor is also included

Special events during The Colour of Water

Curator's talk: Wednesday 22 April at 11am, by Janet Bayly, curator of The Colour of Water and Director of Mahara Gallery. Entry free, all welcome

Double Portrait: Finding Frances Hodgkins
A play by Jan Bolwell, directed by Ralph McAllister.
Featuring Jan Bolwell, Perry Piercy and John Wraight.

Venue

Mahara Gallery, Mahara Place, Waikanae
Friday 1 May: 7.30pm, Saturday 2 May: 7.30pm, Sunday 3 May: 4.30pm
Friday 8 May: 7.30pm, Saturday 9 May: 7.30pm, Sunday 10 May: 4.30pm

Cost

$25 / $20 concession
Tickets available from Saturday 18 April, 5pm at Mahara Gallery.
Also from Bookstacks, Raumati Village, Paekakariki Fruit Supply
Also from Bookstacks, Raumati Village, Paekakariki Fruit Supply

Advance press release
Mirek Smisek: 60 Years 60 Pots
Mahara Gallery, 21 June – 16 August 2009

Mahara Gallery, Kapiti Coast’s District Gallery, is presenting the first-ever survey exhibition of leading Czech/ New Zealand potter Mirek Smisek (b1925). Curator Gary Freemantle has selected 60 key works spanning his 60 years’ of production from private and public collections around New Zealand. These represent Smisek’s basic forms of vases, bowls, crocks, jugs and unomi (Japanese tea-bowls). Freemantle says, ‘Smisek’s development has been characterized by its consistency and slow evolution. However over the years there are perceptible differences and a sense of growth as his work has matured. My main objective is to define the main forms and variations of glaze, shape and decoration’.

Smisek presents not only a stunning model of a lengthy and award-studded career as a potter, but of a creative life well-lived. He was one of numerous European émigrés to New Zealand who escaped the German occupation of his homeland, interrogation by the Gestapo, and months in forced labour camps and factories. Smisek formed a strong personal philosophy of the life-affirming value of creativity and the arts as a result.

Smisek started working with clay in Canberra and Sydney in the late 1940s, assisted English potter Ernie Shufflebottom briefly at Crown Lynn in Auckland, then established himself as Nelson’s first working potter in the 1950s. He worked and studied with ceramic masters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada at St Ives and in Japan in the 1960s and 70s. After import restrictions were lifted in the early 1980's many NZ potters suffered from the deluge of cheap pottery that flooded the market. Some were made redundant and others tried to redefine their work in more sculptural terms. Smisek has continued to survive and work resolutely as a potter, producing ceramic ware that people can use in a functional way but also appreciate as an object that fuses function and aesthetics. Over the past 35 years he has established 3 studio potteries on the Kapiti Coast - at Manakau, Te Horo and latterly Waikanae, where he continues to produce new work.

Mirek Smisek: 60 Years/60 Pots will be accompanied by a catalogue reproducing every work in the show, with biographical and critical essays by Janet Bayly and Justine Olsen, and is available to tour.

Press release
2 March 2006
Mahara Gallery
For immediate release

Mahara Gallery presents drawings by the late Joanna Margaret Paul

Opening at Mahara Gallery in Waikanae on Sunday 5 March, Subjects to hand: Joanna Margaret Paul Drawing presents 70 exquisite drawings by the late Joanna Margaret Paul, most of which have never been exhibited. Over nearly four decades, using the simplest of drawing materials and looking no further than her immediate surroundings, Paul accumulated a body of work brimming with graphic invention and poetic observation. When she died in a tragic accident in 2003, she was at the height of her powers.

Mahara Gallery Director, Gerald Barnett, comments: ‘Paul drew wherever she was. That dedication and alertness to the visual world can be seen in these drawings – by turns delicate, lyrical and vibrant – of children, rabbits, bowling greens, chess players, swimming pools, beach fires and lighthouses, even views from aeroplanes and buses.’

Subjects to hand has been developed by Mahara Gallery for the 2006 International Arts Festival. ‘It is an honour for the gallery to be able to present such distinguished work and we are grateful to Joanna’s family for the opportunity’, Barnett added. ‘We are also very pleased to have produced a beautiful 140 page book in partnership with Auckland University Press, their first ever co-publication.’ In the book about the artist’s life and work, Joanna Margaret Paul emerges as ‘complex, intense, a woman of faith, a romantic, a feminist though she would eschew the term, a fighter’. Her art is highly sophisticated, but also accessible and full of humanity: a rare combination in contemporary art.