Artistic reminder of times gone by
Whanganui artists Leonie Sharp, left, and Carmen Simmonds with their art work Those Who Should Venture, which they have donated to the Wanganui i-Site.
An artwork inspired by an advertisement from the 1860s has been donated to the Wanganui i-Site.
Leonie Sharp and Carmen Simmonds created Those Who Should Venture in 2010 for the Whanganui Arts Review.
The work is a full sized cast glass and feather sculptural dress and represents the pioneering women of the region, with the title based on an 1860s advertisement in a British newspaper asking for women to come to New Zealand.
Wanganui i-Site promotion and marketing manager Lyn Cheyne was delighted to have the work as a permanent exhibit.
"It is exceptionally beautiful in its supposed fragility against the strength of its construction. For visitors to the i-Site it's wonderful for them to see genuine and relevant art representative of the region and its history."
Those Who Should Venture explores the congruence between the corset and the definition of the landscape. Where the wire fence formed boundaries between culture and defined physical limits and the wire on the women's undergarments controlled and defined their femininity and their previous cultural identity.
For the last three tears I have been experimenting with more sculptural ideas and have had a lot of fun meeting and making friends with the amazing members of the Whanganui Pottery society.
These members have taught me a great deal and have at times dispaired at the ambitiousness of my ideas with the medium they know so well. I have worked mainly with sculptural and paper clay and am now using this medium with my feathers, fibre and natural found objects to satisfy a new tangent of ideas raging around in my head.
Who knows what will happen from here.
I now have a page of inchoate works in this medium called Sculptural Tangents.
