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Auckland artist Patrick Lundberg was announced last week as the 2014 recipient of the University of Otago’s Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, one of New Zealand’s most prestigious art fellowships. Beginning on 1 February, he will receive a stipend for a year and a studio on campus to pursue his art.

“It’s a prestigious fellowship; I didn’t have any presumption I would get it and I’m very grateful for the opportunity,” he told Critic.

“At the moment I work four days a week, so I’m looking forward to a year as an artist full-time. This will be the first time I’ve been able to do this.”

Over the course of the Fellowship, he intends to pursue a direction of work he began in early 2012, but to “change [it] in unforeseen ways.”

“The last time I was afforded a bit more time for my practice, I noticed that sort of thing beginning to happen to a greater extent. When you have more room and more time, you can try things that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of.”

The works in question consist of a collection of 15mm-diameter painted spherical pins, which are arranged on the gallery wall in a meeting of painting, sculpture and installation.

The painting on each pin ranges from fine mottled patterns to seemingly random letters, but the inspiration for these patterns is often “quite arbitrary.”

“I just want to pursue the natural inclination to expand the vocabulary of my work,” Lundberg said. “It’s a different way of articulating that these works are actually a volume, a ball, rather than a flat thing like a dot, to give it that feeling of a solid. The colours also give a dynamic relationship between the balls, so each one has an individuality.”

His works are best thought of as being like games and instruments: they’re a set of objects to be performed on and that is what distinguishes them from other kinds of painting.

“They have the potential to implicate the viewer much more actively and make them perform it. The boundaries are very different, they’re being worked out as I make them.”

With influences such as New Zealand’s Richard Killeen and the American conceptual minimalist artist Fred Sandback, his work builds on a rich art history. But whereas these artists’ work comes with a set of instructions to be performed by an institution, part of Lundberg’s work is that nothing is set and definitive.

“I’m interested in intensifying the level of contingency in the work, and changing that relationship between the work and its iteration by another agent, be that an institution or an individual. The things that I make, rather than existing as game rules or a musical score, exist more as a set of physical parameters that you can play with.”

The Frances Hodgkins Fellowship is an annual artist residency that has seen the likes of Ralph Hotere, Rohan Wealleans and Kushana Bush develop their practices.