StreetscapeNZ - 49

Tinakori Road, Thorndon

Wellington

April 2009 Ajr

A Touch of Glass

Sunglight catching at Stems

Handblown

At Arts Centre Market, Christchurch

October 2009. Ajr

A Vineyard Moment

It was autumn when I got to the Hawke's Bay in May and all the vines were turning lustrous shades of red and gold. Sadly, the weather was not quite what we've come to expect from the Hawke's Bay - grey overcast skies rather than the usual vibrant blue, but somehow it didn't matter. Regardless of the time of year you visit, this part of New Zealand - slung out on the North Island's east coast - offers food and wine lovers some of the best experiences in the country. From superb farmers' markets, orchards, chocolate-makers and boutique preserve makers to over 45 wineries producing everything from cabernet sauvignon to riesling, chardonney, sauvignon blanc and sweet dessert wines, it's a feast from dawn to dark. You'll also find some of the loveliest boutique accommodation here, with something to suit all budgets. www.hawkesbaynz.com

From the Food Files

Red Beet Salad

Prepared To Perfection

And Photographed

By Chef Ben Batterbury

At The Rees Hotel, Queenstown

www.therees.co.nz

Art Statements

I received an invitation to this new exhibition - Ilios, at High Street Project in Christchurch - but I've set it to one side and can't remember who has created the show. I did however, have fun following the poster all over the city on the weekend. I love the way it has 'taken up residence' with other signs and posters to create a visual expression in its own right.

Responding to Nature

This is one of the few Christchurch public artworks that, up until now, I have studiously ignored. I’m not sure why. It’s not that I don’t like it – well, not exactly – rather that it annoys me at some level that I haven't quite been able to pinpoint. I feel a little cheated that Christchurch has ended up with what I would call one of Chris Booth’s ‘lesser works.’ The work, obviously created by New Zealand sculptor, Chris Booth, is entitled Taurapa and was created as the Christchurch-Seattle Sister City Sculpture in 1996-97. The form of the sculpture resembles a taurapa, or the stern post of a Maori waka (canoe) and it references the waka that once plied the river it sits beside. Booth, born in 1948 in the Far North, has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and internationally. Along with several public works in New Zealand he has completed public commissions in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. I’ve seen a good many of Booth’s works and he has a reverence for nature that I like – that in fact is what strikes a chord in most of his viewers. His works have a certain ‘humanity’ to them. He’s not trying to be too clever, too esoteric, too intellectual. They pay homage to the land they are created in; they use the materials of the site and they celebrate the raw beauty of nature. I particularly like his Earth Blanket series, which you can check out by visiting his website. (This work is from his Slab Series). Most of his major works are illustrated there, so I’ll let you form your own opinions. www.crhisbooth.co.nz

Art Signs

Love the way someone has removed the 'M' from Smart and placed an apostrophe to make it Jonathan's Art Gallery rather than the original Jonathan Smart Gallery. (Maybe it was Jonathan himself?)

Lattitudes

Christchurch-based sculptor Graham Bennett recently presented a new exhibition called Latitudes at The Arthouse, here in Christchurch (Sept 16 – October 4). The show is theoretically over but when I drove past the gallery last weekend, his works were still in situ, still glinting in the sun, still casting small and miraculous shadows across the inside and outside of the building. I HAD to stop and take some long distance photos – little fragments of detail, slithers of shadow and reflection, a tangle of components and ideas. I’ve written about Bennett’s work on this blog before and he also features in my Artist Studio Series, which you can see by clicking on either name in the label line below. It’s been a busy year for Bennett. In 2008-2009 he’s had solo shows in Japan, Hong Kong, and Waiheke Island; and he’s created stunning collaborative works with Dunedin fashion designer, Donna Tulloch, which were shown at Dunedin’s ID Fashion Week and also later exhibited in Japan to coincide with Yokohama’s Triennale of Contemporary Art. (I’ve also featured these stunning smaller pieces on this blog – “When Sculpture Meets Fashion”). The year has also seen Bennett show large works at Waiheke Island’s terrific ‘headland – Sculpture on the Gulf’ and in Sculpture in Central Otago, another large outdoor exhibition staged at Rippon Vineyard in Wanaka. In addition to the interior works at The Arthouse’s new show, Bennett also created a new work – Orbit – which, at eight metres high, has been installed outside the gallery. You can find out more about Graham by checking his website: www.bennettsculpture.info www.thearthouse.co.nz

New Inner City Street Art

I roamed around town for three hours this morning, making the most of the return of fine weather - enjoying taking photos of new signs, posters, shop windows and the like. It's amazing how quickly change takes place in a city and I have a number of places I frequent for that very reason. One of them is Manchester Street - always slightly shabby and interesting, always changing. I noticed these new doors on a fish and chip shop there. They've obviously commissioned a street artist to create a lively, in-context approach for their business. I like that. I like too, that increasing numbers of businesses are hiring graffiti artists to give their premises - and even their vehicles a distinctive look. You'll find the same thing happening in SOL Square (South of Lichfield), which probably started 'the legitimising of street art' in Christchurch. The developers there hired graffiti artists from Auckland right back when they opened about three years ago, and the place is a visual feast of colour and chaos. This is a new work that has been created on one of the lane walls just this last week. I'm all for it. Good street art gives the inner city character and imbues dark alleys with colour. What can be wrong with that?

From the Church Files

Since it's Sunday, I decided to rummage around in my Church files to see what new architectural perspective I could bring to the table - as it were. This is what I came up with....two of my favourite photographs taken in Christchurch. I like to think of them both as being a little odd - in the conventional church sense. The bottom shot is taken at a Catholic Church over the other side of town (which is the terminology I usually give a place when I can't remember the name of the suburb); the top image was taken near the intersection of Colombo Street and Moorehouse Avenue - not sure what church though. I'm constantly drawn to this form, if only because it's so incongruous and unexpected. All I can say is, I hope Jesus was in a forgiving mood when he was 'introduced' to these strange architectural oddities.

StreetscapeNZ - 48

Tuam Street, Christchurch

A Place to Dream

Soft comforts at Teichelmann's Bed & Breakfast

Hokitika on the West Coast www.teichelmanns.co.nz

Small Moments of Greed

Lemon Meringue Pie

Enjoyed in Sumner

In a Greedy Moment

August 2009. Ajr

And So to Sleep.....

A Bedroom with a View to Die For

Cool, Calm, Spacious, Classy

The Rees - Overlooking Lake Wakatipu

And The Remarkables.

www.therees.co.nz

Showtime 8 - All the Fun of the Fair

Image Courtesy CCC&NZCup&Show Week

Love the swirls of colour and movement in this image from last year's Royal New Zealand Show. It says so much about the pace, the colour, the extravagance, the fun of New Zealand Cup and Show Week, which is now New Zealand's largest festival of racing, fashion, agriculture and entertainment, all crammed into one hectic week from November 7 -14. It's a week that's filled with parties and socialising and a city filled with hats and high heels. I loved watching all that last year when I was in Melbourne in time for the Melbourne Cup. As trams, cabs and trains pulled to a halt all over the city, passengers spilled out in their finery - giggling groups of young women excited yet still a little self-conscious about wearing hats; men in pinstriped suits; the fashionistas strutting their stuff. It's the same in Christchurch - although forget trams and trains spilling out hat-wearing race-goers. That ain't a happening thing here; but packed bars and restaurants are. And for the kids the Royal New Zealand Show turns on another whole world of entertainment - the animals, the rides, the fairground atmosphere. It's all happening - soon! www.nzcupandshow.co.nz www.theshow.co.nz

Billboard of the Week

This is what I love about billboards - their ability to transport you some place else, their ability to distort visual reality. This image is so large that at first glance it really does look like there is a woman swimming in a giant tank on the side of an inner city building. It's such an unexpected juxtaposition that you're forced to look twice. That, for me, is a successful advertising campaign - something that makes me look harder, longer and think about possibilities and 'unlikelihoods.'

More From the Word Files

Layers - Stories - Suggestion - Histories - Age

Tucked between Typography

Writ Large & Bold

It's a Sign

A Huddle of Words

Signposting

Christchurch's Newest Cafe September 2009. Ajr

Words on Walkabout

I am a word collector. As a writer by profession they are ‘the tools of my trade’ of course, but words are SO much more than that to me. It’s about the typography, the shapes and shadows, the forms. It’s about the colour – the same word written in red, blue or green suggests very different things; it’s about the location – a common word transported out of its usual context draws me up short - who put it there, why, what were they intending for me to take from it. And I love a quirky unexpected partnership of words. I get inspiration from them all.

I adore signs. They potentially contain a wealth of humour and an insight into a culture; and billboards for their ability to take words on a gargantuan journey. And then there are the old signs, the old typography – no longer fashionable yet still clinging to the timber and brick facades of the older parts of towns and cities. They tell another whole set of stories with their curly, worn letters – intimate tales of old-fashioned businesses like shoemakers, bookbinders, tailors: good gutsy trades that no longer hold the sway they once had (more’s the pity). The peeling paint, the fading letters, all suggestive of the inherent layers of time and history stacked up between the ‘ms’ and ‘es’ and ‘ys.’

All these things become graphic souvenirs for me. I take photographs, I note down words, phrases, unexpected couplings, I take rubbings, I admire, I gather, I hoard. I have books filled with words. I have handmade books dedicated to ‘word play’ – little typography collages that trigger something deep within my creative processes. Other books are dedicated to ‘words for short stories’, to the fiction-writing processes that for me, often require a very visual starting point and a sustained ‘visual gorging’ to bring an idea to life. That ‘visual research’ is absolutely intrinsic to my creative processes.

And since I’m giving away all my collecting/hoarding secrets, I may as well confess to also collecting old type. Wooden type blocks just DO something to me. I can’t go past them. One of the best birthday presents anyone ever gave me, was a little handmade box with a lid covered in Japanese paper machine-stitched with the letter A (for Adrienne) and inside the box? A collection of wooden A’s. (Thanks Marianne!). I have wooden type ‘prancing’ all around my house – over walls, on mantelpieces, on sideboards. I have old type cases that have been transformed into miniature display cases. And I have a whole set of old lead type – never quite as pretty – which sits quietly in my bedroom corner – chiefly because I can’t lift the box without all the letters spilling out. So there it sits, in the shadows under the old Singer sewing machine that acts as a bedside table, weaving its own silent stories.

Suffice to say, I am surrounded by words and the products they make, advertise and direct – books, signs, type, posters, bookmarks, product boxes, cards, photographs - you name, I’ve probably got it. It goes without saying that this makes for an unusual domestic interior but I’m happy with that. I may have written extensively about expensive contemporary design and architecture but I have no yearnings to live in a glitzy, soulless box that says nothing about its owners and everything about the architect who created it – dwellings where everything is perfect and nothing is out of place. I’m much happier with floor-to-ceiling visual stimuli, in a place of visual chaos in fact, where my eyes can spontaneously come to rest on a giant word roaming across the top of a door frame, or on a quirky shop sign that is so out of place in my kitchen as to be comical. For me, inspiration can come from anywhere; everything communicates; words sing!

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 68

"A Bit of Toilet Humour"

There's not much I can add to this - other than to say I'm delighted to welcome the beginning of a new inkjet print series from one of New Zealand'sa top printmakers. For others in series click on Cleavin in the label line below.