The Artists – The Beach – A Summertime Collection 2023-2024.

The Beach – A Summertime Collection 2023-2024 showcases submissions to an open call to textile practitioners within and beyond Aotearoa, New Zealand. Here is the link to information about the Open Call: https://fromoutofthebluestudiogallery.com/the-beach-a-summertime-collection-2/

It was delightful that new artists applied for consideration as well as some of our well known contributors from previous exhibiting with the gallery. Open calls such as this are an exciting way to grow our community of makers so that we can share more of the wonders of textiles and fibre arts to a greater audience.

This list is in alphabetical order (to be totally democratic!).This is where you will find the artist statement about their works in The Collection beside their names mostly in their own words. Full bio details as provided by the artists are available in a hard copy at the gallery.

Maggie Atkins

I often caught trains from Sydney down the South Coast.   I was to meet my felting group, near Illawarra beach.  It was a very hot day but I was told it was “safe” as miles from the bushfires burning further south. The clouds rolled, the sun burnt crimson and the ocean was roaring.   I was hot and uneasy that day. My work in The Beach – A Summertime Collection 2023-2024 captures my unfamiliar fear and discomfort.     

Judith Balchin

Man’s Footprint has been inspired by a piece I did for a National Embroidery Exhibition titled “Material Evidence”. Having been a fisher person many years ago, I was aware of some of the debris that can be left on the beach by people. The day I went was after a storm and I was disheartened to see what was on the beach. Besides the evidence of fishing, there were ‘recycling’ plastics, clothing, glass, shoes and jandals. 

Heather Baskiville-Robinson

Living by the sea and hearing the waters of the ocean is my inspiration. Gathering harakeke and raupo from the wetlands evolve into my Ara, my journey, my pathway and my creative and necessary release in my life.
Kete (baskets) symbolise the knowledge absorbed through ancestral sharing and evolve

into experimenting with the indigenous fibres from nature. my mind.

“Mai uta ki tai
Mai te rangi ki te whenua Ko nga mea katoa he tapu” “From inland to the coast From the sky to the land everything within is sacred”

Finola Chamberlain

Since retirement, every day brings an opportunity to explore and learn something new, to challenge myself to push beyond previous boundaries and safe comfort zones. Discovering how the age old materials of paper, textiles. threads and fibres can be reimagined and used to tell stories is a great journey to be making. For this Collection – telling the story of fondly remembered childhood trips to the beach.

Viv Davy

Viv lives by the ocean, the winds bring the sands of the shore into her garden and even on occasion, into her home. There is a constant soundscape of the ocean. To say The Beach is profoundly anchored in her reality is to reduce the bond that exists between the artist and the ocean. As often as Nature will allow, the ocean holds the artist every morning for a meditative bathing, an awakening to the day surrounded by the fluid support that enables the contemplation of clouds, birds, spray, surges, winds, sifting sands, swells and all the other multisensory inputs the ocean/land liminal zone allow.

Debbie Dawson

Debbie loves to work with colour and texture and to explore the intricate ways yarn can be manipulated with either a pair of needles or a hook.She also loves to share the many skills learnt during her fibre journey being a very active member of Creative Fibre New Zealand, Frankley Spinners and New Plymouth Creative Fibre.

Debbie moved to New Plymouth from the UK in 1998. Her mother taught her to knit when she was 8 and her mathematical background has given her a love for complicated patterns, be it cables, lace  or colourwork.  Retirement in 2020 has given her more time to explore all kinds of  aspects of knitting, crochet, spinning and weaving as well as working with paper and fabric. She also teaches knitting and crochet through the winter months.

Gill Evans

I have a deep connection with the beach and the sea having lived nearly all my life near the sea and mostly with a view of it. The beach is my go-to happy place it revives me, calms me, centres me. Shells are my keepsake reminders of the beach and my adventures there. Maybe these oven mitts will be a reminder of your time at the beach.

Helen Harvey

I am an emerging mixed-media artist with a background in landscape design. Inspired by patterns in the landscape, and imprints left by mankind, my paintings and textiles are richly layered. The philosophy of living in harmony with the environment is a common thread. My creative process allows me to simultaneously express diverse responses, such as railing against waste, and celebrating the beauty of wildflowers. 

Karen Johnston

An easy walk along a beach becomes an opportunity to discover simple but often overlooked treasures. These simple treasures ask “What if..?.” or “How can..?.” The lure of possibility transforms an easy stroll into an artistic journey with an unplanned outcome.

Nature helps.  The hard work has already been done by the sun, sand, sea and wind. Rough edges become smooth, colours change or fade, wet becomes dry, patterns emerge, holes and gaps appear, shapes and textures all change as nature does its thing. 

Nature starts the process.  Time and creativity enhance and transform, bringing meaning and a new life to simple objects.

My pieces for The Beach all began as an easy stroll along a beach. The treasures  all “told” me what they wanted to be and the message they wanted to convey. I just had to listen.

Mere Keating

 I live in the now 

Each moment is now

I choose to see my selfworth 

 I love & approve of myself

Mere♡

Meremade potae/hatmaker

Mere E Keating 

Te ati -haunui a paparangi whanganui /

Tuwharetoa 

Maree Liddington

My love of weaving, especially tapestry, suits an expression of my love for the beach. A keen tramper and photographer I always feel recharged by walking along a beach, exploring new beach environments at different places in my travels. My work develops the photos taken into balanced design and colour expressions, conveying to the viewer my emotional engagement with The Beach.

Sarah Millington

Sarah’s pieces in the The Beach focus on Aotearoa’s climate, with it’s prevailing westerlies and how that sculpts the landscape and the trees. It may not be a gentle tropical beach, but our west coast beaches are things of rugged exhilarating beauty and with treasures found in our rocks.  

Birgit Moffatt

Birgit has adopted Aotearoa as her homeland and in so doing is embracing a making practice that draws extensively on natural fibres found in her surrounding environment. She describes herself as being in co-existence with Nature which is evident in the way she manipulates her materials. They retain their vibrance and life forces while conveying the symbolic message Birgit has in mind at the time.See more of the works the gallery has exhibited from Birgit at https://fromoutofthebluestudiogallery.com/dialogue-with-papatuanuku-solo-exhibition-of-birgit-moffatt-18th-february-26th-march-2021/

Jan Macneil

Jan has the incredible skill and creativity that enables her to create beaded sensory cloths. For this collection the knitting needles and bead collections have been used to take us to the beach – the shoreline where we can see out across the sand, the water and into the junction with the sky. The tactile nature of the knitted cotton is a site for contemplation and meditation, these cloths find homes with highly tactile people who love the feel of the beads and the created clot. Serenity and centering can come through this engagement. More about Jan and her practice can be found on her link: https://fromoutofthebluestudiogallery.com/more-than-a-feeling/

Nynke Piebenga.

Nynke is a senior handweaver who has taught and nurtured nearly all other weavers in New Zealand. She draws endless inspiration for her makings from the colourscapes offered by natural environments. The colours of the dunes and the soft dusk light on the still ocean waters can be seen in the blankets offered for The Beach – A Summertime Collection.

Beth Pottinger – Hockings

What is important in my work is colour, balance, shape and texture – it must please or draw the eye in to it. I like to challenge myself to create works from an inspiration – photographs, nature, objects etc. I wonder how I can create my version of it. I then research and collect more ideas and images to enrich the idea. I always find the act of creating to ber contemplative, meditative. soothing and energising.

Florence Potts

Florence has a life long love affair with spinning, creating distinctive finew yarns from mixed fibres. It is about unique textures, colours and ‘hand’. From these wonderful spun yarns Florence then creates items that are heirlooms as they are created. Her creation for The Beach is a perfect example of combining all these aspects to create a special garment that would be perfect to wear after a day at the beach, when the wind lifts and the sun starts to set. Like wearing a kiss from the ocean.

Margaret Rogerson

As a child, I loved going to the beach, collecting shells and then displaying them (carefully labelled) in beds of cotton wool in old lingerie boxes. These days I still collect shells but prefer the fragmented and imperfect ones, which have a beauty of their own.  A keen stitcher from childhood, my interest in art quilting developed from my love of fabric and colour. My inspiration often comes from nature or the built environment, preferring the imperfect, the weathered, and the fragmented. I particularly enjoy the challenge of working to themes or working from stash only, and in the last few years  I have also been experimenting with mixed media and found materials. 

Liz Sinclair

Liz has chosen to settle in South Taranaki partly because it allows her access to the wild beaches hugged by beautiful treescapes. Beaches and tress are both abiding passions for Liz’s art practice which is primarily painting. For this current exhibition works combine her painterly skills with her fine stitch work to create memory holders that convey her love of this natural environment. Check out more info about Liz and her works previously exhibited in the gallery at https://fromoutofthebluestudiogallery.com/liz-sinclair/

Jeanette Verster

This body of work is a representation of vague memories of beach walks on the wild Namibian coast that in places are littered with ancient, decaying ship wrecks. In most cases all that remain is unrecognisable iron objects that are alternatively hidden or exposed by the ever-shifting desert sands of the Namib and the relent waves of the Atlantic Ocean. On a calm day the gentle swells of the blue sea belie the furious nature of the storms that caused countless ships to come to grief.

Wendy Watson

A traveller for many years, a maker for even more Wendy draws on anything that feeds her imagination to inspire her making. Long beach walks watching the colours, textures and light have inspired her pojagi hangings for this collection. Movement, nothing in perpetual rest, shifts, multiple readings, shimmerings – tricks of the light on the beach – captured here in these panels.