Each month a member of our community is invited to browse our online collection and select six of their favourite artworks. Each ‘My Choice’ selection, together with personal responses to the works, will be available to view on the Sarjeant Gallery website for one month at a time. The March 2020 My Choice has been selected by Riah King-Wall, and is available to view until 30 April 2020. Riah King-Wall is a freelance cultural sector professional and postgraduate student currently traveling around New Zealand. Previous roles have included Public Programmer at the Whanganui Regional Museum, Arts Advisor at Whanganui District Council, and Strategic Lead, Creative Industries and Arts at Whanganui & Partners. Riah’s selections are a love letter to four and a half years spent living in Whanganui, with each work connecting to a particular place-based mood, memory or location.
My Choice April 2020: Riah King-Wall, freelance cultural sector professional and postgraduate student.
Click on an image to see further details about the work and artist, and view a large version.
Whanganui Regional Museum, Wanganui – Ans Westra
“The Whanganui Regional Museum brought me to town in 2015. I spent two excellent years running their public programmes, enjoying the magnificent collection and delicious staff morning teas. This image by Ans Westra is taken from the Watt St side of the front entrance and shows a woman sitting in front of a sign for a temporary exhibition, on what is today a garden planted with native plants. For me, it feels like a fond snapshot of my everyday experience at the Museum – learning about natural and social heritage inside the building, then popping out to Pukenamu Queen’s Park for a lunchtime picnic in the sun.”
Pheasbin – Emily Valentine Bullock
“Anyone who has taken a dog for a walk around the bridges will be very familiar with the base shape of Pheasbin. This work is a delightful glow-up of one of the city’s canine waste bins, where feathers transform it into something slightly mythical and removed from its original down-to-earth purpose. My dog, for one, would be more than a bit intrigued if he came across Pheasbin on a run.”
“A highlight of my time in Whanganui was collaborating with the Whanganui Walls team on the inaugural 2019 street art festival. One of the works, a portrait of Edith Collier by Detroit-based artist Pat Perry, came out of the artist working with the Sarjeant Gallery and the Edith Collier Trust to delve into Collier’s back catalogue. Viewing her palette was a highlight of this process for me – there’s something really special about seeing the tools she used, still with dabs of hardened pigment swirled over the surface.”
Crystallized fallen pine, saltworks boundary – Wayne Barrar
“This dusky pink, slight sci-fi Wayne Barrar image seems to depict a cloudy blush potion, with a trapped tree dipping its branches and cones into clutching crystals. This image was chosen because of its tantalising associations with food, with swimming, and with discovering something new and perhaps a little unsettling. It’s also a beautiful image in itself, and when taken in tandem with its suite-mates in ‘Saltworks: The Processed Landscape’, it presents an intriguing glimpse into a very commodified landscape, and the mass production of something as everyday as table salt.”
Wide flat pouring vessel. – Rick Rudd
“Whanganui-based Rick Rudd is one of New Zealand’s pre-eminent potters, and this work is an example of his exploration into functional extremes of a vessel – here, a teapot, signalled by a spout and a handle, becomes a flat puddle of lava-like texture. Seeing Rick’s dedication to New Zealand pottery, when we have worked together on projects to support the museum he founded (Quartz, Museum of Studio Ceramics), has been both humbling and uplifting.”
“Lynn Hurst’s work is the ultimate blend of specimen study, symbology, art history, nostalgia, mad science, and the domestic. Aside from being an assiduously constructed and very thoughtful image, Vanitas also feels familiar – it reminds me of a bee-sting while out walking in Bastia Hill, of magnolia trees hanging over fences in Whanganui East, and of silvereyes chatting away in the feijoa tree out the back of my house.”
