ARTISTS Frances Battersby, Christine Boswijk, Niki Caro, Derrick Cherrie, Rachael Churchward, Pat Clifford, John Collins, Paerau Corneal, Gordon Crook, Paul Cullen, Michele Dales, Judy Darragh, Julian Daspher, Margaret Dawson, Neil Dawson, Andrew Drummond, Belinda Ellis, Jacqueline Fahey, Kris Farrier, Warwick Freeman, Jill Gibens, Stephen Gibbs, Giovanni Glass (John Croucher, John Leggott), Ralph Hotere, Robert Jahnke, Megan Jenkinson, Richard Killeen, Lauren Lethal, Lucy Macdonald, Alison Maclean, Paul Mason, Joanna Merwood, Claude Megson, Anna Miles, Gary Nash, Tim Nees, Gregor Nicholas, Michael Parekowhai, John Parker, Peter Peryer, Matt Pine, Erenora Puketapu-Hetet, Monique Redmond, Michael Reed, Ann Robinson, Peter Rogers, Stephane Rondel, Marie Shannon, Terry Stringer, Wi te tau Pirika Taepa, Elizabeth Thomson, William Toomath, Toby Twiss, Matthew von Sturmer, Denys Watkins, Kate Wells, Peter Wood, Peter Woods CURATORS Mary-Louise Browne, Gregory Burke, Ken Davis, Deborah Lawler-Dormer, Leon van den Eijkel, Paul Walker SPONSOR Firth Concrete Products, Mudge Builders, Winstone Wallboards, Placemakers, Hocus Pocus Toy Shop, Light by Aesthetics, Rent DTR PUBLICATION essays Deborah Lawler-Dormer, Frank Stark, Paul Walker
Home Made Home reflects on the kiwi home. Merging art, craft, and design, it explores every aspect of home: past, present, future, and imagined. It includes seventy-five works by over fifty artists, photographers, architects, craftspeople, and filmmakers.
The lead-in wall features a list of building materials and functions of domestic life, alongside plans drawn from New Zealand architects depicting domestic interiors.
Inside the Gallery, a freestanding ‘Platonic house’ is based on the generic-house shape everyone drew in childhood. Inside, Elizabeth Thomson’s Buprestid (1990) features little bronze beetles climbing the stairs and crane flies sitting on the walls.
The Gallery's own walls frame conceptual sections: there’s the Modernism Wall, Post-Modernism Wall, Feminism Wall, and the Thicket of Design. Each features a printed statement.
The Modernism Wall’s text speaks of ‘liberation from the dictatorship of cubes’. There are excerpts from architects Le Corbusier and Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Richard Killeen’s painting Woman Dancing with Six Chairs (1969) pictures a colourful, abstracted living room.
In front of the Modernism Wall, Terry Stringer’s Living Room (c.1979) is shielded by its own brick wall. It offers a painted 3D illusion of a cubist living room. A Portrait of the Queen (c.1979) is an abstracted image of the ideal 1950s colonial kiwi home.
‘Driven by domestic chaos, it spills out of the house’, explains the text for the Feminism Wall. Works include a commissioned installation by Judy Darragh: fur cutlery hangs on the wall of a warped living room; everything else is covered in acrylic fur or spikes and rendered unusable.
The text on the Postmodern Wall reads, ‘The inside is merely a fold or imagination in a generalised “outside”. Denys Watkins’s screenprint Semi-Detached (1981) depicts a chaotic, surreal home, where everything is displaced.
Since it’s school-holiday season, kids come for a two-day workshop where they design and build furniture. There are also workshops for adults. Lauren Lethal demontrates how to make art and furniture from ordinary domestic objects. Michael Donn leads a seminar on 3-D architectural drawing. There are screenings of films linking themes of domesticity, madness, and futility: Niki Caro’s Sinistre (1989), Shereen Maloney’s Irene 59 (1981), and Gregor Nicholas’s Rushes (1988).
Upstairs, a complementary collaborative project by Gavin Chilcott and Ralph Paine, Scheme, also explores ideas of home.
