Andrew Drummond is a Christchurch-based artist who works across different media, best known for his large-scale kinetic sculptures and installations. A major survey of his work was held at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2010.

Drummond takes a transformative approach to materials, and has sometimes incorporated meticulously hand-polished pieces of coal into his sculptural work. His photograph of this elemental material in its jewel-like, modified state utilises double exposure, and is from a series exploring the subtle, varying effects of rotation, reflection and light. (Above ground, 2015)

In this deconstructed tent, Pip Culbert has removed everything except the seams. What’s left is like a line drawing, or a plan of a tent at one-to-one scale. Culbert’s work claims space, yet sits lightly on the wall – much as a tent sits lightly on the land while providing a temporary home for its inhabitants. Culbert was a British artist who often exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand, regularly travelling to visit friends around the country. Her ‘ghost tent’ evokes a sense of movement through, and temporary encampment within, the local landscape.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Ivy Fife directs the eye towards the red brick building, designed by local architect Cecil Wood and completed in 1928, home to Digby’s Commercial College in Worcester Street. Fife’s vantage point is her own rental accommodation in St Elmo Courts, a 1930-built apartment block that stood on the corner of Hereford and Montreal Streets until the 2010–11 earthquakes, opposite the old Canterbury College where she was a lecturer at the School of Art. Below, archetypal inner-city flats form a scruffy barricade between the refined Georgian-revival secretarial college and her elevated apartment.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)

Capturing a time and place that remains familiar for many, William Dunning’s photorealistic painting of Christchurch’s Cathedral Square pictures the window-reflected Regent Theatre and southeast corner of the 1960s modernist Government Life Building. Both were demolished after the 2010–11 earthquakes, as was the building in which they were mirrored.

Dunning is a Christchurch artist for whom local history is an ongoing concern. Reflection is a significant early work, and was presented by the artist in 2011.

(Above ground, 2015)

Julia Morison’s 'Some thing, for example' is like a broken life-support system for the waiting, blob-like entity which, although securely caged, seems more traumatised than dangerous, and without anybody to administer aid.

Like all who experienced the 2010–11 earthquakes in Canterbury, Morison, living near the edge of Christchurch’s cordoned ‘red zone’, was delivered a frequent heightened dose of adrenaline. With this, she encountered new aesthetic possibilities in found, discarded objects; sculptural media of a kind that the physical environment had never previously supplied. From a situation of dislocation and abandonment, she has created work of an unexpected material and formal beauty. (Above ground, 2015)

Glen Hayward’s towering Yertle had its origins in a collection of twenty-eight abandoned paint tins he spied in a back-of-house Christchurch Art Gallery storeroom, containing the residue of wall colours from past exhibitions. Meticulously recreating these tins out of wood, Hayward then painted his carved replicas, faithfully reproducing every smear and drip of forgotten paint.

Stacked up like its namesake, Dr Seuss’s vainglorious turtle king, Hayward's Yertle is a feat of painstaking fearlessness. (Above ground, 2015)

R. P. Moore ascends the cathedral’s spire to put his swivelling Cirkut camera to its familiar task. Up the narrow spiral stone staircase, a breezy ladder, past the bells, he reaches the balcony with its clear view facing west. A heavy morning frost means it is cold; the coal smoke of home and office fires lend partial soft-focus to the view.

The Square below has a single horse carriage and thirteen motorcars neatly parked. A tram beside the Clarendon Hotel curves right towards the Square. Tram tracks cut sweeping lines in the frost. None below have noticed the elevated cameraman, who turns the switch. it's five past nine as the camera begins its mechanical roll.

(Above ground, 2015)

Fiona Connor is known for subtle interventions that invite us to consider how we use and inhabit different spaces. This domestic window (one of nine in a larger series) occupies both actual and imagined territory. Embedded directly into the wall, it allows rare and disconcerting access to the Gallery’s underlying structure. Fiona’s windows are also meticulously reconstructed replicas, based on the real-life bedroom windows of gallery attendants from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, where the work was first shown. The memory of their dreams and imaginings complicates our view, as the personal oozes into the institutional.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

A youthful Queen Elizabeth II became the first reigning British sovereign to visit Ōtautahi Christchurch, efficiently arriving (from Te Tai Poutini / the West Coast via Otira and Darfield) at the city railway station with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at exactly 5.45pm, Monday 18 January 1954. The moment inspired a unique response from local artist Ivy Fife, whose deft, expressive mark-making captured something of its excitement and energy. Pictured in warm evening light beneath the distant Port Hills and pitched roofs of the Gothic railway station, a somewhat chaotic scene is held together through strength of colour, composition and brushwork.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)

Edinburgh-born commercial artist James Fitzgerald exhibited this meticulously rendered view of Cathedral Square in Ōtautahi Christchurch alongside another titled A Corner in the Square. The two paintings were described as “large street scenes, very bright and almost photographic in quality”. One reviewer found their “frank realism … notable” but also expressed the wish “that an artist of such ability had employed his imagination to greater advantage”. This work, however, was published by several Te Ika-a-Maui / North Island newspapers alongside the heading “Fidelity in Painting”. When shown again at the Otago Society of Arts in November, a reviewer deemed this one the less successful, being “not so well handled, and considerably overstated in colour passages”. Putting vintage quibbles aside, Summer Evening in the City may be recognised as something rare, recording a now unrecognisable view from High Street into Cathedral Square, on a balmy 1930s evening in raking summer light.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)

L. S. Lowry’s best-known paintings present rhythmic crowds of ‘matchstick figures’ spilling across tightly constructed northern English industrial and urban landscapes. The sparser setting of Factory at Widnes presents one of Britain’s grimmest environments, a birthplace of the chemical industry. Some have interpreted the trio of strolling bowler-hatted figures as factory managers, others as perhaps visiting comics – Charlie Chaplin and transatlantic duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were still in the public eye when this was painted, and two of the three had performed in Widnes. Lowry had developed his own uniquely comical outlook over forty-two years while treading the streets of Manchester as a rent collector with the same company, from which he retired on full pension in 1952. This part of his story was long kept hidden from an admiring public.

(Leaving for Work 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)

Ronnie van Hout’s installation recreates his childhood home in Aranui, a suburb of eastern Christchurch, and his primary school in nearby Wainoni. A looped video replays his daily bike ride between the two locations. Together, these elements present the story of van Hout’s beginnings.

Familiar architectural structures, however, are taken beyond the ordinary by the presence of a hovering, makeshift UFO, whose surveillance results appear on a nearby monitor. Can we read this as a picture of suburban childhood experience as an alien might see it, or as the artist’s memorial to the need for imaginative survival and escape?

(Above ground, 2015)

Paris-born Louise Henderson’s subtle architectural study cleverly frames a section of Manchester Street east of Cathedral Square in Ōtautahi Christchurch – a streetscape largely intact until the 2010–11 earthquakes. Her vantage point was the seven-storey New Zealand Express Company Building in Manchester Street (later known as Manchester Courts, and demolished after the earthquakes). The location of Henderson’s studio at this time is unknown, but it is tempting to speculate that this was the work she exhibited in 1933, titled View from Studio Window.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)

Louise Henderson was a Paris-born interior and embroidery designer who moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925. In her earliest paintings, from 1933 on, she was regularly drawn to urban and industrial subject matter such as city streets, brickworks and rock quarries. She became a key figure in local art circles, including as part of The Group, and influential in the development of a Canterbury landscape painting style. The Addington Railway Workshops opened in Christchurch in 1879 and closed in 1990, at its height employing over a thousand people. In its depiction of workers assembling locally produced locomotives, Henderson’s fascinating composition reflects something of her left-leaning political interests through the 1930s and 1940s.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)

Christ Church Cathedral, a defining symbol of this city since its consecration in 1881, was designed by the English architect George Gilbert Scott, with input from the local supervising architect Benjamin Mountfort. In its present earthquake-damaged state it represents a significant challenge for this city’s church, civic and cultural leaders.

James Fitzgerald and the younger John Mills Thomasson were both British-born commercial artists who settled in Christchurch: Fitzgerald in 1923, after twenty years in Auckland, and Thomasson after serving in Mesopotamia (Iraq) during World War I. Both produced etchings of local Christchurch views and exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts.

(Above ground, 2015)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s The Drawbridge is one of sixteen plates from a folio of prints depicting imaginary prisons that has repeatedly haunted and inspired writers, artists and architects for over two and a half centuries. Three of Piranesi’s Carceri engravings, for example, were included in Alfred H. Barr’s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.

First issued in 1749–50, but attracting little attention to begin with, the series was republished with heavily reworked plates in 1761, yielding darker, more detailed and more resolved prints that brought an attendant increase to their public reception and acclaim. (Above ground, 2015)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, son of a Venetian stone- mason and master builder, trained in architecture and stage design before moving to Rome and training there as an engraver. Producing many picturesque Grand Tour views of Rome, he was hugely influential on the classical revival in European architecture. In Rome in 1755 he befriended the visiting architect Robert Adam, who praised Piranesi in a letter to his brother in London:

'[S]o amazing and ingenious fancies as he has produced in the different plans of the Temples, Baths and Palaces and other buildings I never saw and are the greatest fund for inspiring and instilling invention in any lover of architecture that can be imagined.'

(Above ground, 2015)

Bill Sutton’s Private Lodgings captures a sense of the history of a notorious Ōtautahi Christchurch boarding house, the Manchester Private Hotel. This hundred-room, three-storeyed timber boarding house on the corner of Manchester and Southwark Streets had fallen into disrepair. The hotel’s address appears frequently in newspaper reports, starting with repeated requests for replacement porters and kitchen staff. Next to these were frequent court reports documenting varied misdemeanours, its occupants including bankrupts, petty criminals, arsonists, thieves, trespassers, vagrants and one murderer. Further reports spoke of damage from frequent room fires as well as unchecked borer, dry rot and rats, and the late discovery that it operated without a license, leading ultimately to its demolition in 1963.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)