Current Exhibition

An exhibition of works by the children and young people of the Ashburton District. Come and view the creative work taking place in schools around your community.

“I have been a working artist for 20 years - combining my painting with living and travelling in different parts of the world. Whilst living in the Northern hemisphere, my subject focus was people and their immediate environments. For example, markets were a wonderful place to paint, whether in the United Kingdom or North Africa. It was the interaction between people whilst buying, selling, bargaining, etc - that I tried to instil into my paintings - with all the colours of the stalls and the variety of food found there. Since my arrival back in New Zealand in 1996, landscapes have been the focus of my work, painting on location. Because of the overpowering nature of the land, with all the changing colours and forms - people have tended to become irrelevant.” Janet de Wagt

“I was born in Ashburton and lived here for the first seventeen years of my life. I then went to Christchurch, where I studied for the Diploma in Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, graduating in 1976. I then worked as a designer for a couple of years, before travelling to Antarctica, then onto Asia and Europe, before settling in Scotland, where I was gatekeeper at Edinburgh Zoo for two years. During this period I became increasingly interested in writing and illustrating books for children. Since 1998, however, with the support of my wife, I have been working fulltime on my own writing and illustrating and, as a result, I have been able to take on an increasing amount of illustration work. When I was a little boy, my grandfather told me there was a wolf in the plantation, opposite his farm in Mayfield. I have been trying to draw it ever since.” David Elliot Between 1999 and 2002, David Elliot illustrated four New Zealand anthologies of poetry and short stories (two of each) for Random House, New Zealand. The Gallery has recently purchased the four cover illustrations for its permanent collection.

When Joanna Margaret Paul died in 2003, she left behind an extraordinary collection of work. Stored in her Wanganui home and studio were hundreds of artworks, many of which had never been exhibited, including oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, photographs and films. She also left a body of work as a poet and prose writer, including a wealth of unpublished material. By concentrating on Joanna Margaret Paul’s drawing practice, the exhibition examines in-depth an essential aspect of her output. For an artist who had limited exposure during her lifetime the effect of this treatment will be revelatory. The daily practice of drawing was the sieve through which Paul passes sensation and thought. Wherever she was she drew. This quality of dedication and alertness to the visual world is palpable in the exhibition: there are drawings of sick children, discarded toys, rabbits, bowling greens, swimming pools, bonfires and lighthouses, views from aircraft and buses… nothing was beneath her notice. The emphasis on drawing is timely too because in contemporary art there is renewed interest in the exactitude and sensuousness of drawing as a method of visual ‘inquiry and invention’. In this context Joanna Paul’s art is ripe for re-evaluation, but it is also ready for a much broader audience. Highly sophisticated on the one hand, her art is also extremely accessible — a rare combination. The exhibition encompasses a wide range of approaches to drawing and a number of media including pencil, pastel, watercolour and collage.

Need Christmas presents for friends and loved ones? The Ashburton Art Gallery can help you support New Zealand Made. What better gift than an original piece of pottery by a New Zealand artist (gift wrapping service available). The Summer Pottery Show (Cash & Carry) features works by more than 15 New Zealand potters including David Walker, Susan Sky, Shona Clarkson, Mary Bartos, Christine Davey, Hugh Ricard, Neil Hey, Gaye Morton, Marie Rusbatch-Dawson, Anne Pullar, Frederika Ernsten, Averil Cave, Lizbeth Hansen, Dianne Register-Stout, Chris Lewis, and Susan Blackburn. “My training as a potter involved intensive learning in all facets of producing domestic stoneware and selling to a New Zealand market through studio and galleries. This met a need (or dream) of being allowed to live a creative, self-sustaining lifestyle and my children able to grow up happily in two beautiful rural areas of New Zealand: Nelson and Banks Peninsula. Although I have had no formal art training beyond secondary school, my initial interest has always been towards painting and drawing. A need to draw has been a wonderful tool in my development of skills and the formation of ideas in using clay as a creative medium." "Currently a lot of my clay work explores a slightly more sculptural aspect which has grown from the making and appreciation of objects for functional day to day use. Clay being a tactile piece of earth and ancient in its geological formation easily inspires a sense of the archaic and collective ethnicity through its use. In this respect I love to create the illusion of objects made in other times and places, the act of making provides a point of fascination and curiosity for the imagination to travel from.” David Walker