Fibrous Soul / Set Dressing

The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery presents two new exhibitions featuring Aotearoa New Zealand-based artists from multiple generations whose works offer routes to consider the body and the social and material forces which shape and reshape it, and invite us to attune to the multiple, unfolding processes of transformation and renewal that make up the world.

Including major recent and new works by Sorawit Songsataya, alongside a new installation by Maata Wharehoka, Fibrous Soul considers the many ways states of transition and the passage of time are measured and registered. Featuring moving-image works and sculptural installation composed from Ōamaru limestone, Taranaki andesite, sedge mats, rattan, and plant matter, Songsataya’s material inquiries think across multiple scales—from the perspective of an individual life, and the network of relationships that make living possible, to slow-moving geological cycles of formation, attrition, and renewal of the earth beneath our feet.

Following time spent in Taranaki in 2023, Songsataya extended an invitation to artist Maata Wharehoka (Ngāti Tahinga, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Kuia) to collaborate in this project. A long-time resident of Parihaka Pā, outside Ngāmotu New Plymouth, and kaitiaki (guardian) of Te Niho o Te Atiawa—Parahuka marae, Wharehoka has been instrumental in the regeneration and advocacy of Kahu Whakatere—tikanga Māori death and burial practices. Wharehoka’s installation comprises materials central to Kahu Whakatere, made by members of Wharehoka’s whānau (family) and individuals who have been involved in its development. Constructed of whariki (mats), hukahuka (tassels) and taura (rope) produced from harakeke (flax), the work responds poetically to the process and its core philosophical tenets. Considering both the physical world, and possibilities beyond it, Fibrous Soul makes porous boundaries between states of proximity and distance, vibrancy and inertia, the living world and other realms.

Set Dressing brings together Gary Cocker’s 1985 photographs of Christine Hellyar’s Apron sculptures with recent works by Cao Xun to consider the body’s relationship to the social and material world. A recurring visual form within Hellyar’s practice since the 1980s, the artist has written of the apron as a kind of “skin,” which at once protects its wearer from the mess of domestic and industrial work and writes the traces of an encounter with the world onto the body. Cocker’s images, which feature his then-lover and a friend posing in a range of locations, from the bush to the beach, transpose a queer sense of glamour onto Hellyar’s work, making explicit the visual punning and erotic associations of Hellyar’s materials and their placement.

Cao’s visual language employs gloss and glamour to consider the ambivalent workings of identity and socialisation. Though sensuous, playful and pulsing with desire, Cao says his works circulate around “embarrassment.” Cao’s images dwell within the tensions between shame and relief, pleasure and repulsion, self-effacement, and revelation. Together, the artists in Set Dressing consider photography’s capacity to harness, distil and complicate desire, and offer that the gendered, sexualised body remains as much a site of contestation today as it was forty years ago.

In the Open Window, the Gallery continues its programme supporting early-career Taranaki artists to develop their practices with Sean Hill’s new installation Energtopia. Hill’s work comprises wall-based painting and painted forms constructed from wooden off-cuts, which together open multiple possibilities to consider patterning, sequencing, surface, and texture.

Released during the exhibition, the associated publication Set Dressing is designed by Ella Sutherland, and features an expanded selection of reproductions of works by Hellyar, Cocker and Cao, writing by Dr. Kirsty Baker, Priscilla Pitts and Samuel Te Kani, and an extended conversation between Cocker and exhibition curator Simon Gennard.