New Work

  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.

The glass top also explores the fragility and strength of those women and the woven skirt represents the transition from mountain to sea with grasses and seeds indicative of those regions.




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.

Feathers

I am often asked where I source my feathers and it is a hard question to answer. The first bird responsible for my journey into all of this was a rosella killed by a cat and too beautiful not to do something with. After that originally many of the birds I used were road kill spotted as we drove along. Apologies if you were ever behind us as we screeched to a halt to lift a pukeko or duck from the road before it became too mangled.
As I began to need more and a greater range of feathers I have tried to source them commercially ( I still can't bring myself to be responsible for hunting my own ) with mixed results. Often once people know I use feathers they too will pick up any bird they find they think may be useful, it is not unusual to find a corpse on the doorstep!
My uncle who lives in the backblocks outside Gisborne will often send down birds culled from the farm and has been my main source of feathers ( and lots of weird stuff like possum teeth, pig tusks and deer skin) up until now - Thanks Uncle Star -x.

In the last month I have made contact with a commercial pheasant farming operation called Rathmoy Game Preserve just out of Hunterville. They breed and raise pheasants for commercial shoots.
http://www.rathmoy.co.nz/

It was quite conflicting to see such beautiful birds shot in such huge numbers (indeed at all) but to have access to the fifty cock pheasants I took away to pluck at the end of the day was pure gold.
While I found the whole English gentry type atmosphere quite surreal I couldn't help but admire the way the dogs worked finding the fallen birds or the beauty of the surroundings and the whole occasion.
Thanks Mark - check out the web link if this is your thing.

I now have enough feathers to try alot of new things without being being nervous about the scarcity of them and can now also indulge in some larger pieces.

I am, however, still grateful for any plastic bags left on my door step and still stop the car with very little warning!

NZ Art Show 2012

The New Zealand Art Show is on again it is a three day visual feast - an exhibition showcasing thousands of artworks by hundreds of New Zealand artists. It is the largest of its kind in New Zealand. I will have 3 single Artist walls and am bringing some new work with a wider range of materials and styles, I do still have some of my regular work too for those who add to their collections every year. Thanks for the support I look forward to seeing you there.The 2012 show is being held 2 - 5 August, 2012 at the Events Centre, Queens Wharf, Wellington.

http://artshow.co.nz/

Keith Street School Exhibition

During 2011 I worked one day a week with some young artists from Keith Street School in Whanganui.

We looked at different paint techniques, pottery and photography as ways for them to express themselves and meet the schools vision of “Community, Identity, Achievement”.

The final part of our assignment was to put together, publicise and host an exhibition featuring their creations.

The photos are from the opening night, a night where the students and their families truly believed that they were artists. The photos are from one of the students, Hokorima.

This was one of those situations where you go into it thinking you are helping someone out, and then you get so much from it and learn so much about yourself that you end up wondering who taught who.

  

TRUTH

This is my entry for the Whanganui National Art Exhibition.

My piece is a mixed media Cloak – It is woven from cotton with an outer skin of media pieces from local newspapers.

The inspiration came from the unbalanced coverage of Whanganui issues in the media, from the “H” issue, school bullying, the DHB sagas, murder investigations, gang patch ban and Mayor Laws’ use of the media to self promote, leading to an unbalanced, one sided, outside view.

The inner cloak is made using Maori finger weaving techniques representing the core or inner person, but the media pieces are glued and tacked on representing the more superficial and hopefully temporary perception or world view.

When Whanganui is represented negatively in the media all of us who live here have to wear it, whether it is accurate, fair and truly news worthy or not. While this cloak and the text on it are specific to Whanganui it also reflects, how I feel, Maori issues are covered in the media generally.

The quality of what is inside is obscured by what is seen from the outside. What we wear close to our hearts, although concealed, is the most important and is the truth.

Great New Zealand Art Show

Thank you to all those people who came and saw me this weekend, it was a great show and the quality improves every year. Thank you to everyone who purchased work, especially those people who come back every year, it really means alot to me.
I apologise if I gave anyone else the flu! I could hardly speak on Saturday and hope I haven't infected too many of you.
The photos here show the set up we had at the show.

Setting up the display

A sale!

New work

All dressed up and ready to go - drugs were holding off the flu at this stage!

Thanks again to every one who came I still have some pieces for sale and can be contacted on email Leonie.Sharp@gmail.com