Category: Art

  • Caroline McQuarrie – new date and venue

    This month’s Conversation and Cloth event will be with Caroline McQuarrie, textile artist and photographer. Caroline will be joining me at our home in Cobden – please email for the address – next Saturday, the 9th December at 11am to talk about her practice and our art collection. The event is free and open; please…

  • Wharenui Harikoa

    Wharenui Harikoa

    This week, news came that a Fabulously Exuberant and Rather Wonderful building will open up on December 1st in Waikato Museum in Hamilton. Wharenui Harikoa (House of Joy) is the idea of Lissy Robinson-Cole and husband Rudi Robinson. Together the pair hatched the idea of creating a crocheted meeting house – a wharenui – out…

  • The New York Times series on young Africa

    The New York Times is running a series of articles focusing on the youth of Africa. The “youth boom” of the continent is changing both it and the wider world, altering perceptions and driving change through invention, creativity and energy. There is plenty to read in the articles including pieces about artists, designers and makers…

  • Think macrame was over in the 1970s?

    It is time to think again! Laurentine Périlhou, a French artist who has been working with the craft for almost ten years, is making waves with the reinvention of this ancient and traditional craft from the Arab world.

  • Conversation and Cloth: Caroline McQuarrie

    Conversation and Cloth: Caroline McQuarrie

    The last Conversation and Cloth event for the year will be a chat with artist Caroline McQuarrie. Caroline has roots in the West Coast and explores histories through photography, video and domestic crafts. In this Conversation With we will be talking about her works in woven images. The venue for the event will be the…

  • Of cloth, peacocks and Scandinavia

    Of cloth, peacocks and Scandinavia

    Each month a talk about something in the textile collection in Greymouth Mawhera is held in the Regent Theatre. This month’s event was about art textiles including textiles as artistic mediums, art on textiles, and textiles as art. The subject ranged from the French mid-century printed, woven and needleworks, created by artists and designers as…

  • Lincoln University’s art collection

    This week a visit to Lincoln University library led to the campus collection of art. The University, the oldest agricultural teaching institution in the Southern Hemisphere, was created in 1990 when Lincoln College, Canterbury, was made independent of the University of Canterbury. There was no collecting policy in place but after the sale of cigarettes…

  • Sure to Rise

    Sure to Rise

    Vivienne Mountford, in 1993, created a wonderfully witty and deceptively powerful artwork to celebrate women. Edmond’s Cook Book is a New Zealand institution. For more than 100 years the company has made baking supplies and sold cookbooks. Everybody in Aotearoa knows Edmonds! The old factory building in Otautahi Christchurch became iconic, its facade gracing the…

  • Kate Sheppard

    Kate Sheppard

    Kate Sheppard was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in New Zealand. In 1847 Kate Malcolm was born in Liverpool, England and migrated in her twenties to Christchurch Otautahi where she married Walter Sheppard, a merchant. In 1885 Kate Sheppard joined the fight for liquor prohibition by becoming a member of the new Women’s…

  • The shape of wool

    The shape of wool

    Fire! The word sometimes is warming and comforting, and sometimes it is terrifying, especially when it comes to the power fire has to destroy lives and livelihoods. In 2021 a fire ripped through a large area of land in the Xhariep District of the Free State of South Africa, destroying, amongst others, a merino wool…