The Whau Arts Festival is back again for 2021. This year’s festival is the “Whau ArtBOOK”, free for all and soon to be available from your local dairy in the Whau area. It showcases, celebrates and activates the creative energy of the Whau area – and goes well with a pack of chippies or a mince and cheese pie! In the meantime, you can catch a taste of whats to come at the Great North rd gallery
Shout out to I Love Avondale for hosting this exhibition. Find out more about the Great North Rd Gallery here:
The Artists
Daniel Weetman
Kia ora, My name is Daniel Weetman. My artwork is partly inspired by my Fijian Roots on my mother’s side and the 70’s wallpaper of my childhood home, which gave me a love for clashing colours and patterns. Gravitating towards collage and paper mediums, the repetitive cuts and lines of the folded paper give a tribal, mask-like appearance which is prominent through my recent work. Also a member of The Black Seeds, I contributed to creating the art for our last album, “Fabric”.
Having recently moved to Avondale, I am stoked to be part of this Whau project and living in this community.
Vinaka!
Instagram: @cracksanddents, @suluvoodoo
Tim Danko / deadxeroxpress / Zombo Vertov
Material cartoonist adrift.
A negotiation with the outside? World, sometimes cultural, environmental sometimes it is negotiating with material making itself. We have been lucky to witness this process of negotiation and the work becomes an archive of this process, filtered through tendencies and conditions – within the cartooning group this negotiation becomes a re-presenting of possibly overwhelming forces.
I am constantly awed that we can be invited to witness and participate in this negotiation, and by shifting the focus of this presentation in the space away from archiving a finished object to presenting an open process within the the group we hope to provide the viewer with the possibility of sharing in this invitation to negotiate with material that has been so readily opened. So that we may possibly re-examine our own everyday negotiations with…. Force.
Michele Powles
Maker, baker, mum of boys and award winning writer of many things, from poetry to film, novels to non-fiction.
Michele has been a writer, producer and dancer across the globe. Now based in West Auckland, she is the mother of two small boys, both equally obsessed with creating new worlds (mostly under their beds). She was the 2010 Robert Burns Fellow and her writing has
been published internationally as well as being broadcast for radio in NZ and the UK. She has most recently been selected for the Attagurl International Talent lab for her screenwriting.
Marcus Hipa
“Surround yourself with good people.”
I’m a Niuean Artist.drawing,painting and carving are some of the forms of creating I use to explore and share insights of my peoples history and culture.celebrating our values,traditions and our ability to adapt,as well as shedding light on social,political and climate issues affecting our Pacific people in our Pacific region,in Aotearoa and internationally.
Avondale Primary School
Morgan King (Whaea Morgan) + class of Tui 1
A class of ‘Tui 1’ children (Year 1) from Avondale Primary created this masterpiece together for the Bi-annual Avondale Primary Art Show. Their challenge was to cover the entire canvas and be bold and brave in their use of colour. Each child had a turn at painting with acrylic paint, followed by Posca Art pens to give added detail. The children thoroughly enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot about mixing colours as well as the values of sharing, cooperation and patience.
Janet Charman
A monograph: Janet Charman, ‘SMOKING: The Homoerotic Subtext of Man Alone, A Matrixial Reading’, Genrebooks, Dunedin, (2018), is free to download at: http://www.genrebooks.co.nz
Janet Charman’s eighth and most recent collection of poems ‘仁 Surrender’, (2017), OUP, chronicles her writing residencies in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Janet Charman is the featured poet in the current issue of broadsheet 25 (May, 2020), The Night Press, Wellington.
Her latest essay ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary, How does your garden grow?: Allen Curnow’s suppression of the poetics of Mary Stanley’, appears on-line in: Women’s Studies Journal, Volume 33 Number 1/2, December 2019: 103-112.
Max White
Max White has lived in Avondale since 1982. Worked in Art and Design education for over thirty years, at both secondary and tertiary levels, the last twenty at the Auckland University of Technology.
Jean Stewart
Portrait of local hero Anne Riley
I just hope she likes it.
It has been 20 years since I decided to be a painter and I was thinking as I struggled through this latest painting that it hasn’t gotten any easier. It’s still this momentous struggle every painting . Each painting feels like starting from the beginning, everytime the unbeatable challenge to grab out of coloured mud a moving target. Everytime I feel at some point like I don’t know what I’m doing. I aim for my paintings to be of use and to be beautiful and interesting for the eye. With the whau hero portrait I wanted to capture Anne’s warmth and friendliness.