Touch.

Exploring textiles and our sense of Touch. A Curated Collection

25th April – 3rd June 2024.

This collection of works is a response to a call for artists working with New Zealand fibres to explore how we touch textiles and how we are touched by textiles. “ Only in touch do we seem to come into direct contact with reality, a reality that actively resists our voluntary actions.” (¡)

Artists invited to join in this exploration are Isla Fabu, Julie Lumsden, Birgit Moffatt, Jess Moughan, Jude Te Punga Nelson, and Kath O’Halloran. Each of these artists create works of distinctive tactile highlights using endemic New Zealand fibres. Their works range across the practical to the sculptural but all invite our human hands to reach out and have an enriching experience of exploring the created works.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood, Poet and Novelist

With this exhibition we are offering our visitors a chance to enrich their gallery visiting experience by engaging their senses of touch without feeling like it is not allowed and in so doing we hope to ignite their emotional engagement with the works. In the textile art world we are often seeking to have affective impact through the surface nature of our works. A rich experience both physically and emotionally.

Things we love that we experience in our makings that we would love to share with visitors to the exhibition,