Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm
Familiar Monuments, bed (1994-1996), Maree Horner, mixed media.
Left: Familiar monuments: drawers. Maree Horner. 1994-1996.
Installation view, Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm. Left: Selected journal excerpts and ephemera. J.C. Sturm. 1958. Right: Familiar monuments: drawers. Maree Horner. 1994-1996.
Left to Right: Familiar monuments: bed and table. Maree Horner. 1994-1996.
Left to Right:Familiar monuments: cupboard, chair, bed, bath. Maree Horner. 1994-1996. Selected journal excerpts and ephemera. J.C. Sturm. 1958.
Selected journal excerpts and ephemera. J.C. Sturm. 1958
Left to Right:Familiar monuments: cupboard, chair. Maree Horner. 1994-1996. Selected journal excerpts and ephemera. J.C. Sturm. 1958.
Selected journal excerpts and ephemera. J.C. Sturm. 1958.
Right to Left: Chair. Maree Horner. 1973, 2019 {remade}. Familiar monuments: bath, bed, chair and cupboard. Maree Horner. 1994-1996.
Left to Right: Familiar monuments: chair, cupboard. 1994-1996.
Chair. Maree Horner 1973, 2019 {remade}.
Left to Right: Chair. Maree Horner. 1973, 2019 {remade}. The Old Coat. J.C. Sturm. 1954.
Chair. Maree Horner. 1973.
Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm
11 Feb — 6 April, 2023
This exhibition a selection of rarely seen work spanning sculpture, printmaking, writing, and ephemera, by two pioneering female voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, artist Maree Horner and writer J.C. Sturm.
This exhibition is specifically located within the realm of the domestic, the routines that make up our daily lives, and the many different roles we inhabit within it. In the past two years we’ve all experienced an acute sharpening of the complexity that is contained within the sphere of ‘home’: it is as much political as it is psychological, creative as it is practical, philosophical as it is emotional. Both Horner and Sturm take up the challenge that it is to harness the many elements that play a role in the processing of and making a life whole through practice. Honing in on the edges of much of this life, their work explores the rituals, forms, and languages we return to in order to craft our worlds and ask could this be otherwise?
This exhibition is presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival.
Our programme 2023
This year we explore the question “where does my body belong?” To have a body is a pre-existing condition we all live with and in, and spend our lives coming to know what this could mean. While we are all born with a body, each body comes with its own unique capacity and limitations. The whether or how these capacities and limits unfold is greatly determined by the society into which we emerge. This year we consider the vast range of what it is to have a body, be a body, and participate within the systems that enlarge or confine us in the dynamic friction of our daily life.
Screening Room
Biographies
Although Waikato born Maree Horner has ancestral roots back to Taranaki through both parental lines. Her early childhood was spent in the Waikato followed by formative years in Eastern Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. In 1974 she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland and is known for her sculptural installation work from this period. She and her family settled in South Taranaki in the early 1980s where she still lives and works. Since the 1990s, whilst teaching full time, she has developed a cross-disciplinary approach to her practice, mainly combining print and paint into large scale mixed media graphic series.
J.C. Sturm,Te Kare Papuni (1927–2009) was a writer of Taranaki and Te Whakatōhea. She was one of the first Māori women to complete an undergraduate university degree, followed by a Masters degree. She was also the first Māori writer to have her work published in an English anthology. Spending much of her life working as a librarian in the New Zealand Room at Wellington City Public Library in order to support her whānau she maintained a writing practice throughout. She published four books of poetry and prose and her work has been included in numerous journals and anthologies. A collected works is forthcoming this year.
Victoria Wynne-Jones is a writer and curator based in Tāmaki Makauaru. Her monograph Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland and lectures, supervises and examines across the academic disciplines of art history, dance studies and fine arts.
Debbie Broughton has whakapapa to Taranaki Iwi, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Porou and Ngāpuhi. She has a Tāhuhu Ahunga Tikanga (Masters of Māori Laws and Philosophy) from Te Wānanga o Raukawa. The Ani Waaka Room is her debut ollection of poems that celebrate the survival of Taranaki ancestors who were forced by war to leave their homelands for Te Aro Pā. The poems weave together ancestor and descendant, Taranaki and Te Aro, family stories and government atrocities. The Ani Waaka Room is a challenge to those who ignore mana whenua in cities, and rongoā for those who know Papatūānuku breathes beneath layers of concrete.
2023 programme
Each year we orbit around one question in the company of artists and through exhibitions and other programmes. Across the year we explore the edges of what this question offers us, and what artworks and their authors can weave together. In 2023 we ask “where does my body belong?” You can think of this as one exhibition in five parts, as a score played across a calendar, or maybe even as a forest.