Dreamers exhibition at Tairāwhiti Museum

Dreamers exhibition, featuring Louise Walsh and Jolene Douglas, opens at the Tairāwhiti Museum tomorrow.

A new exhibition called Dreamers opens at Tairāwhiti Museum on Friday featuring the work of Louise Walsh and Jolene Douglas.

Wellington-based Louise Walsh has taken some time to pick up her paintbrushes again. Her last exhibition was in 2003. She was galvanised into action again by an unexpected invitation to exhibit with old friend and fellow artist Jolene Douglas, with whom she has shared shows before.

Walsh’s new works follow life’s ebb and flow, ups and downs and her insecurities about her work. Each work stems from her first piece, The Beginning, its simple lines and colours creating an overall pattern and base for other works.

“These last few ‘Covid years’ have been hard for us all. Like many others, I have lost significant people, including my beautiful, artistic full-of-life mother. Painting through this time has been cathartic and fulfilling, not always plain sailing. I responded to each in different ways, using layering to build the surfaces and effects which may have taken days or months. The works are unplanned, sometimes exciting, and other times a tricky puzzle. The journey was a thrill for me.”

Walsh hopes the viewer will discover something refreshing and unexpected as she moves from the abstract to the floral — finding rich colours and surprising combinations to smile about.

In my Wilderness We live in Mansions is a series of pastels by Jolene Douglas created for the exhibition Dreamers — a collection of dreamscapes — mystical, magical, botanical.

In each work the artist opens a door to the memories that are housed within these mansions, where stories sometimes wild and rambling, occasionally sorrowful, are relayed through personified plant forms.

Each plant offers up its own story alluding to its magical qualities that have the power to heal and to nurture. Interwoven within these wilderness stories are the mystical threads of mythology.

Jolene Douglas is a contemporary New Zealand Māori artist (Ngāti Pu, Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Raukawa) who has been exhibiting since 1983.

Two of her art works are in the collection of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She lives in Gisborne and been a curator Tairāwhiti Museum since 1995.

Douglas works primarily in pastels and is described as self-reflective.

The republished cover of the classic New Zealand novel by Witi Ihimaera, The Matriarch, features one of Douglas’s artworks.

Her work is in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Douglas is a founding member of the Māori women’s collective Kauwae.