Whanganui’s Tylee Cottage artist Isabella Loudon prepares unique gallery exhibition

Artist Isabella Loudon is in residence at Tylee Cottage, creating an exhibition for Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery.

Sculptor and installation artist Isabella Loudon, the artist in residence at Tylee Cottage, is preparing an exhibition in Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery’s heritage gallery.

Loudon is known for “materially rich” installations using concrete, metal, fabric and salvaged materials to create works characterised by raw surfaces and sculptural intensity, creating environments that speak to labour, impermanence and elemental transformation.

“Loudon’s innovative use of unwanted and unexpected materials makes for work that’s poetic and gritty all at once,” said Sarjeant Gallery senior curator and programmes manager Greg Donson..

Her work experiments with the intersection between architecture, geology, the body and the act of making.

During her time in residence, Loudon will work on a site-specific exhibition in the heritage gallery.

Now based in Wellington, Loudon grew up in Marton and returned there in 2021 while recovering from glandular fever.

Over two years, she created a multi-room sculpture exhibition in a vacant commercial building owned by her parents.

The exhibition, Two Years, One Building, was open to the public in collaboration with Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery in December 2023, before the building was demolished in 2024.

Isabella Loudon turned a soon-to-be-demolished building into an art exhibition in 2023.

“We’re excited to see how a focused period of time as artist-in-residence at Tylee Cottage will enable her to create a site-specific project within the heritage gallery,” Donson said.

“Her practice crosses the terrain of drawing, sculpture and installation, and has a strong residue of her own physicality as a maker, but she’s also acutely aware of how viewers navigate and interact with her works in a space.”

The Tylee Cottage artist-in-residence programme started in 1986 and is funded by Creative New Zealand’s Arts Development Investment Programme and administered by the Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery.

More than 70 artists have been in residence at Tylee Cottage over the past 39 years.

Loudon is the second artist in residence at Tylee Cottage this year, preceded by Ming Ranginui from February to June.

Her time in Whanganui will provide space for experimentation as she engages with the local environment, architecture and history through her exhibition.

“When forming site-responsive shows, I need to spend time observing the atmosphere of a place and how people engage with and within the space,” Loudon said.

“During this process, I look forward to playing with new materials and ideas while also revisiting and reinventing past ones.”

Loudon began her Tylee Cottage residency on July 5 and will finish on November 30, with the exhibition of her work in December.