Art Week has made its mark again this year. The Link (turned art gallery) was even more of a hub of procrastination than usual, displaying a huge range of works of all mediums. Entries to the exhibition were showcased and sold alongside poetry, electronic art, and photography competitions. Critic was honoured to interview the winners of each OUSA-run competition about their passions, inspirations, and just how important and effective these creative outlets can be.
Print Winner
Kiri Murray: Portrait of a Gorse
Though a visual arts student, Kiri has always been drawn to the textile arts. She fell in love with the medium of print work almost as soon as she was introduced. Prints are created by transferring an image, often from something like a screen, onto another surface, such as a canvas.
For Kiri’s main project last year, her lecturer introduced her to cyanotype. This technique involves putting a chemical on a canvas, overlaying an object (leaves, for example), and then leaving it in the sun to create a chemical reaction. The end result is a silhouette carved out from a Prussian blue canvas. In this way, cyanotype is a bit like the in-between stage of a printing process and photography process. Kiri merged this with her style of photo realism and interest in exploring various plants.
Kiri used pressings of a gorse plant on a paper coated with cyanotype solution and pressed between old photography glass plates to create ‘Portrait of a Gorse’. The piece was a sketch for her larger project, one featuring another impressive technique: mezzotint. An arduous process, mezzotint involves using specialised tools to poke a bunch of holes into a copper plate for ink to seep into, creating a dark velvety image. Kiri says it’s her “thing”, describing mezzotinting as the print version of charcoal art, which can take over thirty hours. But she thinks it’s “definitely worth it – the results are so yummy.”
Her mum had a “big entrepreneur idea” of making gorse syrup and selling it to people, but found out that you can’t actually sell gorse as it’s an invasive species. However, Kiri wasn’t going to let it go to waste and was inspired to use the gorse for her art instead. She’s also been experimenting with using plants themselves to make an emulsion – the chemical you use to develop film photography. Beetroot is the leading contender so far. Submitting her art to competitions is going far better than Kiri expected: “People seem to like it – and I’m thrilled.” Kiri was recently in the Pond Gallery fundraiser and is now working on a project for the Aotearoa Print Council.
Photography Second Place
Jemma Bezuidenhout: Not So Angry From This Angle
*Winner of the photography category (Randall X) declined to comment
Jemma was working on her Master’s project on sharks in Dusky Sound when she captured this incredible moment. The albatross in the photo came right up to the back of the boat Jemma was working on, appearing “super interested” in the clicking of the camera. The end result of the interaction was an incredibly unique shot of one of Aotearoa’s largest birds staring right back at her lens. “Albatrosses usually look really angry from the angles they get [captured from], so this shot was really cool for me.” Hence the name of her entry: ‘Not So Angry From This Angle’.
Inspired by National Geographic, Jemma loves pursuing photography alongside her Marine Science degree. The combination of interests takes her to “so many cool places – there’s always something cool to see [...] This was just a really lucky moment. I don’t have the best lens for wildlife photography, but it came up so close to me that its beak was nearly touching the camera.” Jemma used a low aperture (a larger opening of the camera lens) to focus on the head of the albatross and blur the background, making this photograph especially effective.
Sculpture/Other Winner
Christine Reed: Whispers of the Sea
spidervalley.felt.co.nz
Christine’s sculpture journey began when she joined a creative fibre group, which ended up being a “group of little old ladies”. Her first creation was a Christmas ornament. Christine went overseas with her budding skills, and was inspired by her mother in law’s Kitchen Witch (a traditional Scandinavian doll, believed to bring good luck, protect the home, and ensure successful cooking). She wanted to make her own – and then realised there were so many more things she wanted to make.
Needle felting soon became Christine’s passion. Aptly, she describes the art as “using really sharp and differently shaped barbed needles to stab wool together and then sculpt it.” With ‘Whispers of the Sea’ in particular, Christine made the background out of wool from her old alpaca named George. Christine has always loved the ocean and collecting shells, and when she saw the pāua shell in her craft room she was inspired to try and capture the colour. Her love of needle felting was the perfect medium, since the colours can be brushed together. “It’s like painting with fibres to build up the colours,” she says. “Heaps of fun when you don’t stab yourself.”
Despite having less time for needle felting since starting her degree in Anthropology, Christine is sure that the art practice is something she wants to incorporate into the rest of her life. “I’m not sure where it’s gonna take me, but it's one of those things I have to do – a soul-fulfilling thing.”
Painting Winner
Tasia Hill: The Water Lady
Knowing the University held an annual art exhibition, Tasia spent the winter break cooped up in her mum's cold garage-turned-art -studio. There, she painted an astounding twenty pieces – plenty to choose from when it came to submitting her work. Ironically, ‘The Water Lady’ was her least favourite of the works she’d made, and she only submitted it after encouragement from her flatmates and high school art teacher (along with two other works that hung nearby).
Tasia is in her second year of studying painting. After some nude illustrations she worked on last year, she realised she wanted to practice painting people. Usually painting headshots, she decided she wanted to try and depict the full figure and practice the form. She started with sketches, using the website Unsplash for visuals in her creative process, which consolidates free to use images donated by photographers for art projects. Tasia works by drawing from a range of angles of the same figure, then painting layers and layers over the drawings.
Tasia is inspired by a range of artists, including Jenny Saville, who illustrates figures “with a paintbrush style that's really quite expressive.” Her mum is also a huge source of inspiration for Tasia. “Living in little old Alexandria, she had some paintings up in the museum,” Tasia says. She would love to pursue painting in her future in some kind of gallery space.
Illustration Winner
Caitlin Gordon: Do Not Go Gentle
In creating ‘Do Not Go Gentle’, Caitlin was inspired by her work through Te Whare Tāwharau with survivors of sexual harm. Big considerations for her included the huge mental health fallout after experiencing sexual harm, and the strength of survivors choosing to go on rather than be overcome by their experiences.
Chris Jacobs, the Deputy Warden of UniCol, encouraged her to draw this piece, and showed her the poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas – the other source of inspiration for this illustration. Studying a Master’s in Psychology, art is mainly a passion for Caitlin, which she intermittently picks up when she becomes completely obsessed with a project. ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ was this year's passion project.
Caitlin enjoys drawing people most of all because of her love for and fascination with eyes, so she always does them first to ensure she finishes the piece. “Once the eyes are done it's like ‘Oh, it's a person now – I have to finish it.’’’
However, in classic student fashion, she realised the piece was due the next day for the art competition and pulled an all nighter to finish it off and complete those haunting eyes – with great success. Caitlin was honoured to have won the illustration category, adding that the calibre of the other artists were “stunning – absolutely stunning.”
OUSA Glitch Winner
Aimee: Curves of Scoliosis
‘Curves of Scoliosis’ was inspired by Aimee’s own struggle in dealing with scoliosis. Taken a year after her first major spine surgery, Aimee attempted to capture her own journey in this self-portrait, focusing on the actual curve of the spine. After balancing the low lighting and composition, she found this an easy photo to take. She thinks that the effectiveness of the piece is found in the simplicity of the photo, capturing exactly what she had been going for.
Inspired by her mum who had “a big fancy camera” when Aimee was growing up, she was always encouraged to pursue photography as a passion. While she hasn’t done a lot of photography at University – busy earning her Master’s degree in Marketing – Aimee loves being creative and tinkering around with a camera. However, she likes to “keep these things as just things that I enjoy, rather than making it into a job. It keeps the spark alive.”
Electronic Art Winner
Kate: When Memories Snow
Kate’s animatic to the Mitski song ‘When Memories Snow’ drew inspiration from the play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and from discussions with her friend over the connections between this play and Mitski albums.
‘When Memories Snow’ explores the experience of the main character and her downward spiralling mental health – which Kate showed through a range of symbols and the progression of the art style in the video.
The lanterns represent delusion, one of the character’s coping mechanisms, and the truth that she was trying to hide from – breaking apart in the moment everything comes to light. The moth represents the delicacy of the character, and the mannequin demonstrates the worth she places in her beauty, something she believes she has lost with age. The musical notes mimic a repeated piece of music in the play, which reminds her of the past, and draws her back to a traumatic moment.
Although Kate usually prefers oil paintings, she thought this style of digital art fit better with the song she wanted to use. Impressively, Kate managed to fit hours of intense brainstorming for each individual lyric, rough animations for each drawing and finalising the entire project alongside her first-year Health Science studies.
Poetry Winner
Bonnie Shaw: Suddenly, and with warning: a moment I felt robbed
I come from kaimōhū and harakeke,
toto and ponga,
little fingers covered in red ochre.
I told you of the patupaiarehe,
pale and watching,
who reside upon Pirongia and Kakepuku.
I come from where your tūpuna built redoubts,
burned whare karakia,
and sent my whānau south to the lake.
You spoke about our patupairarehe,
claiming all I had shared,
and making up all you could not remember.
Bonnie was prompted toward creating a project after a personal experience that made her consider the colonisation of Māori kōrero.
Despite her aptitude with language as a third-year English student, Bonnie spent nearly two months trying to work out how to go about exploring this, writing half poems over and over again. Nothing really stuck until the final day the poem was due, when Bonnie pulled out the entire draft. The accompanying painting was also part of Bonnie’s submission, a way of visually representing her words.
Describing the deeper meanings in the poem as “behind thoughts”, the stanzas alternate between people stealing kōrero, and descriptions of places to illustrate their roles throughout history – “There’s still blood there, we remember.”
One such allusion is to the Rangiaowhia massacre during the Māori land wars. The Crown had assured the safety of the women and children taking refuge in the farming village, but they fabricated a threat of war after the village began sending food to the Kingitanga, and attacked the village. The villagers ran into the whare karakia to hide and to pray. They were burned alive. The Pākeha Church in the village remains standing to this day. She also alludes to colonisation of the Māori myth of patupaiarehe – white skinned, red headed people who live in the mist in the mountains, and are feared by most hapū.
Bonnie drew on both personal experience and the experience of her hapū to explore Māori hesitations in sharing kōrero due to the risk of people taking advantage and “Pākehā-ifying” it, especially when Māori are still suffering the effects of the violence during past colonisation. “Some Pākehā want to take it under the guise of us ‘all being New Zealanders’, but being a New Zealander does not make you Māori – and does not give someone that right.”