Kirsty Lillico: Heavy Falls / 4 July – 25 October 2026

Kirsty Lillico Doer Upper [detail] 2025, carpet, rope, acrylic paint, cement, sisal flooring. Courtesy of the artist

Kirsty Lillico: Heavy Falls

Wellington-based sculptor Kirsty Lillico has, over the past decade, built a reputation for work that sits deliberately in the hinterland of craft, sculpture and drawing. Her works using carpet, a material that has characterised her practice, drew inspiration from the cut-out floorplans of modernist buildings. These works hung, draped and folded against walls, catching the attention of Aotearoa’s art community and winning her the Parkin Drawing Prize in 2017. They were a kind of provocation – serious sculptural thinking conducted entirely through a material most people walk over.

Heavy Falls is the exhibition that follows Lillico’s residency at Tylee Cottage here in Whanganui in late 2024, and it marks a genuine shift, though not a dramatic one. The floorplans are gone. What remains and has deepened, is her abiding interest in structure, weight, support, and the behaviour of materials when placed in relationship with one another. At Tylee she spent time with a loom, not out of any ambition to become a weaver, but because it offered something she was already drawn to – a simple tensioned framework within which surprisingly complex relationships could develop. Alongside the loom she worked with rope, sisal, carpet and recycled PET acoustic felt found heavily discounted at Murray’s Emporium here in Whanganui. Each material resists or sags, holds tension or absorbs light differently. Each one teaches you something if you slow down enough to pay attention.

That slowing down was, in many ways, what the residency made possible. Lillico normally works around a four-day job, making in whatever time is left. Her time at Tylee gave her the luxury of following materials rather than directing them, arriving at ideas through the act of making itself rather than imposing them in advance. The titles in Heavy Falls reflect this same quality of attention – found, funny, occasionally gritty, arriving late and often sideways. They don’t explain the work so much as introduce another register alongside it, one that leaves room for humour, stubbornness and character.

Lillico holds a Bachelor of Design from Victoria University Wellington, and a Master of Fine Art from RMIT University, Melbourne. She has shown widely across Aotearoa, including in Demented Architecture and Unravelled at City Gallery Wellington. Heavy Falls is her first solo exhibition in a public gallery.

Greg Donson
Senior Curator & Programmes Manger

The Sarjeant Gallery’s artist-in-residence programme is generously supported by Creative New Zealand.

Kirtsy Lillico. Butter my muffin. 2025. Carpet, synthetic felt, dyed rope.