The Chartwell Project

In harmony with New Zealand Music Month, for the remainder of May we’ll be highlighting Chartwell Collection artworks with connections to the world of music. And where else could we begin than with a sculpture inspired by the most famous New Zealand song not actually written by a New Zealander? Tua Whitu, “the seventh”, is one of ten customised guitars made by Michael Parekōwhai under the collective title Patriot: Ten Guitars. The work references the Engelbert Humperdinck B-side that became something of an unofficial national anthem, particularly for urban Māori. Luthier Laurie Williams, a schoolfriend of Parekōwhai, constructed the ten Gibson-styled instruments from imported maple and spruce, complemented by swamp kauri fixtures, rewarewa bindings, and kōwhaiwhai-inspired pāua inlays. This integration of local and imported materials mirrors the synthesis of a foreign pop song with local meaning. Across three exhibitions at the turn of the century — at Artspace Aotearoa, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and City Gallery Wellington — the installation openings were marked by rousing group performances on the guitars, including by Parekōwhai himself. Yet the work’s celebratory, even kitsch, associations are complicated by the artist’s more ambivalent exploration of the uneasy syncretism of post-colonial Aotearoa. As Parekōwhai notes, the word Patriot, emblazoned on the guitar straps, references the missiles used by the U.S. Army during the Gulf War. More broadly, the project questions the stereotype of the carefree Māori musician strumming a guitar. Since the early 2000s, the guitars have dispersed widely. Tua Toru is now held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, while Tua Whā resides at QAGOMA. Reflecting on the work, Parekōwhai remarked: “Five years to separate homes and then they’ll come back. A bit like Split Enz forever coming back for their last show.” And with Split Enz having wrapped up their Forever Enz tour earlier this month, perhaps it’s time for another reunion of Parekōwhai’s Ten Guitars. 📷 Michael Parekōwhai, Tua Whitu, 1999, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Chartwell warmly congratulates Richard Lewer, the Kirikiriroa Hamilton-born artist, for winning the 2026 Archibald Prize for his portrait of Iluwanti Ken, a Pitjantjatjara Elder, senior artist and ngangkari (traditional healer). Here are three works by Lewer from The Chartwell Collection. While markedly different from his portrait of Ken, these three sandpaper-on-text works share the direct subject matter, bold colour, and emotional impact of his prizewinning portrait. Congratulations, Richard! 📷 Richard Lewer, Its true Drawing saved me, 2016, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 📷 Richard Lewer, Untitled, 2016, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 📷 Richard Lewer, Untitled, 2016, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. #RichardLewer #archibaldprize #chartwellcollectionartists

For the final instalment in Actively April, we turn to a pair of early photographs by Kate Newby: Don’t act all scared like before (Kate) and Don’t act all scared like before (Louise). For those most familiar with Newby’s recent installations in clay and glass, these early photographic works may come as a surprise. Yet they reflect a consistent, animating principle in her exhibition-making: the close attention to the quotidian details of specific places that steers her work to remain, in her words, “in conversation with the environment in which it exists.” Another key thread in Newby’s practice is her focus on how materials move: where they are found, how they arrive, and what histories they carry. Put simply, her work reveals the active within the seemingly inanimate. Early in her career, this instinct toward the latent life of objects manifested in projects such as Let the other thing in, a series of casual photographs capturing friends and associates skimming handmade ceramic stones into various bodies of water immediately upon receiving them. The two Don’t act all scared like before photographs were exhibited in Newby’s 2009 show Get off my garden at Sue Crockford Gallery. The exhibition also included the Chartwell works I’m so ready—a yellow wool carpet stained with red wine—and You make loving fun—a single-brick-width, floor-to-ceiling wall. Newby describes Get off my garden as an attempt to make work that “redirect[s] the body through that gallery space” and “shift[s] people around a room in a very assertive way but without being bossy.” Within this context, Kate and Louise might be read as having come up against the alternative: people being shifted the bossy way. In this case, the materials are not only active, but quietly hazardous. 📷 Kate Newby, Don’t act all scared like before (Kate), 2009, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the artist and Sue Crockford Gallery. 📷 Kate Newby, Don’t act all scared like before (Louise), 2009, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Today’s Actively April artwork is Lethe-wards (2010), a two-channel moving image work by Sriwhana Spong. Spong’s research-led practice encompasses a densely layered, diversely realised consideration of language and the body, alongside mysticism, and autobiography. Across more than two decades of exhibition-making, including her inclusion in the Walters Prize in 2012 and 2021, her work has expanded to encompass sculpture, film, writing, performance, dance, and sound. The Chartwell Collection holds a significant group of works by the artist, including multiple moving image pieces, a sculptural instrument, and a garment. Dance is a recurring concern in Spong’s practice, and Lethe-wards emerges from a series of films that reimagine George Balanchine’s Le Chant du Rossignol, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen with music by Igor Stravinsky. Presented as a dual projection, the work features two dancers embodying the Emperor and the Nightingale. As the original choreography is only partially preserved, Spong’s work foregrounds this absence: in a black void, the two figures appear and disappear. Developed in collaboration with choreographer Timothy Gordon, the work draws on Andersen’s narrative, archival traces such as costume designs by Henri Matisse, and Stravinsky’s score. Spong films the Nightingale (Izumi Griffiths) on 35mm film, while the Emperor (Benny Ord) is captured in digital video, creating a dialogue between the historical conditions of the ballet’s production and the contemporary moment of its reimagining. Spong’s sustained attention to the action of the body—expressed through dance and an ongoing engagement with line, gesture, and movement in her sculptural practice—positions her work as a compelling articulation of the “active” in The Chartwell Collection. 📷 Sriwhana Spong, Lethe-wards (video still from one channel of two), 2010, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

“For me, the artwork sits somewhere between saying something specific and being meaningless. It jumps around, oscillating, imminent to meaning but never fully defined.” To mark 50 years of creative impact, The Chartwell Project and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki co-published Being, Seeing, Making, Thinking: 50 Years of The Chartwell Project, a publication featuring 486 Chartwell artists acknowledged at the time of publication, with 150 artworks presented as full-page images and 50 newly commissioned texts that trace the evolution and vision of Chartwell. Extending from this book, The Appendix is an ongoing interview series spotlighting artists not featured within that group of 150, offering deeper insight into individual practices and the broader significance of The Chartwell Collection. Our first conversation is with Auckland-based artist Tahi Moore, whose videos, sculptures, paintings, and performances explore how meaning is formed and unravelled, often adopting narrative conventions, moments, and phrases from philosophy, literature, film, and popular culture. He reflects on his work Unexpected expression in a Bunuel film (2012). Read the interview via the Journal at chartwell.org.nz/thinking/journal/ or follow the link in bio 🔗

Actively April continues with Even for your greatest distraction I would never leave you (House), a kinetic sculpture by the Australian artist Simon Cavanough. Cavanough’s sculptures assemble a bricolage of mechanical components—bodily tubes, industrial cogs, and spindles—into whimsical configurations that evoke lightness and flight. In 2000, for the project “I’m Going Higher Than I’ve Ever Gone Before”, he attempted to build and launch his own rocket. Reflecting on its failure to blast off, he wrote, “In a world in which engineering makes anything seem possible, failure furnished me with a personality”. In 2004, he produced a series of Tim Burtonesque pylons, mounting objects as varied as a radio aerial or a model UFO atop these skeletal towers. Even for your greatest distraction I would never leave you (House), with its sewing machine pedal, model house, and exposed mechanics, forms part of a broader series of absurdist kinetic sculptures produced by Cavanough in the early 21st century. Another example was exhibited at Sydney’s Gitte Weise gallery in the 2001 group show that was now, this is then. It featured an elaborate contraption painstakingly engineered to inflate a small balloon. Drawing on the language and aspirations of industrialism, these works gently poke at the futility of trying to fly. It’s a question that feels newly relevant with the recent return of astronauts to the Moon’s vicinity. Today, Cavanough works as a prop and furniture maker and fabrication specialist for theatre, cultural institutions, and screen production, running Sydney’s Macgyver Models. Appropriately, this early work bears all the hallmarks of a technically minded tinkerer. It is the kind of object one might imagine whirring away with some peculiar purpose in a Wallace and Gromit cartoon. 📷 Simon Cavanough, Even for your greatest distraction I would never leave you (House), 2001, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 📷 Even for your greatest distraction I would never leave you (House) installed in Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection, presented by City Gallery Wellington at Te Papa. 📷 The sculpture in action for Generation X.

Actively April is Chartwell’s theme for this month, highlighting artworks in the Chartwell Collection that embody action. Borrowing from Made Active, the 2012 Chartwell Collection exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, curated by Natasha Conland, “Action exists in the broadest terms as an ‘energy’ in these works, derived from the engagement of the artist’s body, mark-making, suggested and actual motion, and literal suspension or supposed action.” We begin with Hanging by a Thread II, an installation by the influential artist and educator Jim Allen (1922–2023). Allen played a central role in the development of performance and post-object art in Aotearoa and Australia, his impact amplified by a lifelong dedication to arts education. In the mid-1970s, he introduced early performance works, including Contact (1974), and, during a 1976 residency at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Poetry for Chainsaws, Newspaper, and On Planting a Native — all of which he would later restage in the 21st century. These works combine performers and objects to create dynamic situations. While they retain a sculptural lineage, their emphasis is on process and activity rather than the production of discrete objects. Hanging by a Thread II incorporates a quartet of delicate sculptures, text, appropriated images connected to the Iraq War, and documentation of News — the 2006 reconstruction of Newspaper. The work follows Hanging by a Thread (2000), a video montage in which Allen creates and rearranges a poetic sculptural assemblage. On one channel, we see Allen performing News/Newspaper, repeatedly reading and crumpling a newspaper until it disintegrates; on the other, we watch the camera operator Peter Wareing filming the performance. Conland writes in the Made Active catalogue, “Allen’s aim is not to help us ‘fade out’ the [political system which accepts human suffering], but to recognise that we are entangled in it. Any opportunity for simple heroic opposition or closure is undercut.” 📷 Jim Allen, Hanging by a Thread II, 2009, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Chartwell is proud to support Benjamin Work’s participation in the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory. His artwork PĀPAAKI is now on display at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. PĀPAAKI invites audiences into a powerful reflection on the legacy of slavery for the Tongan island of Niuafoʻou, where Work’s grandmother is from. In 1863, 30 young men from Niuafoʻou were kidnapped by an Australian whaling vessel, and later died in slavery in Peru. The metal sculptures of PĀPAAKI, inlaid with whale bone, draw on the Tongan paki, a shield or paddle form. Accompanying these is a photograph sourced from the British Museum, depicting Tongan men performing the meʻetuʻupaki, an ancient dance connected to navigation. “I’m really interested in the idea of repatriating our treasures, our images, our knowledge, back to our own people,” Work shared in a wide-ranging interview with ABC Pacific. The 25th Biennale of Sydney runs from 14 March to 14 June 2026 @benjaminwork @biennalesydney 📷 Benjamin Work, PĀPAAKI, 2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from Creative New Zealand and The Chartwell Charitable Trust. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, Chau Chak Wing Museum. Photograph: David James.

We’re pleased to announce the Chartwell Trust New Commissions Artists for 2026 are Shelton Bray, Lolani Dalosa, Ken Faber, Lily Greig, and Rangi White. The New Commissions programme aims to foster long term support and engagement with emerging artists from Tāmaki Makaurau, and evolved from decades long commitment to exhibiting local emerging practice. We can’t wait to see what this year's artists bring to the programme in 2026. This exhibition opens 9 October 2026. @chartwellproject @tonraysirius447 @dnp1997 @_kekeno_ #lilygreig #rangiwhite Image (right to left): Lolani Dalosa, Shelton Bray, Ken Faber, Rangi White, and Lily Greig.

For today’s Minimal March, we conclude our month-long focus on art in the Chartwell Collection that engages reduced forms, formal systems, and the art object’s literal presence with Motus I, a painting by Auckland-based artist Jeena Shin. For more than two decades, Shin has developed a rich painting system derived from the manipulation of a recurring set of geometric forms. Whether working on canvas or with the architectural space of a given environment, she creates moments for the viewer to contemplate their experience of light and time through complex configurations of hard-edged shapes, often realised in subtle variations of white, black, and grey. Frequently working at a large, immersive scale, Shin’s paintings shift and fold in on themselves the closer you get to them. What initially appears as a stable arrangement of forms gives way to delicate nuances in tumbling shapes, generated through a rule-based system involving the folding of an A4 sheet of paper — remarkably, these paintings are entirely handmade. Shin’s Motus series, exhibited at Two Rooms in 2014, saw the artist hone in on the spatial properties of her methods, layering forms to create a vibrating oscillation of fore- and background. In the accompanying artist statement, Shin writes, “I progressively built up two or three layers to work against the original layer, minutely building up paint thickness. […] By overlapping and breaking up the patterns of the articulated positive and negative space relationships, the swirling/tumbling shapes create a kind of centrifugal movement.” Motus I was included in the 2015 exhibition Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The catalogue for this exhibition notes about Shin’s work, “The word ‘motus’ means a movement or an impulse […] [it] evokes a sense of the triangles’ complex activity […] as a swarm which produces a visually kinetic whole.” 📷 Jeena Shin, Motus I, 2014, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

We’re hiring! The Chartwell Trust is looking for a new person to join our team as the Squiggla Community Programme Developer. The role is based in Auckland and offers a minimum of 15 and maximum of 20 hours per week (flexible). We offer flexible and hybrid working between the office, home and the community. Interested? Find out more and apply through squiggla.org/news-events and thebigidea.nz/jobs or check out the link 🔗 in our bio

Chartwell is proud to support the TarraWarra International 2026: System Release, in Healesville, Victoria. The exhibition includes works by Aotearoa-based artists Nikau Hindin and Shannon Te Ao, and Australia-based artists Alicia Frankovich, Marco Fusinato, Dane Mitchell and Nicholas Mangan among others. The TarraWarra International exhibition series @tarrawarrama launched in 2013, paused in 2020, and now returns with an ambitious programme of ten artists from Aotearoa, Australia and Mexico that explores creative responses to precarious times. Curator and Head of Exhibitions and Programs, Dr Emily Cormack @emilycormackart , says: “We look to artists to expose, explore and interpret precarious global conditions, offering us new perspectives and new ways of being in the world. As international systems of law and governance become increasingly contested, this exhibition forecasts creative approaches that move beyond the tenuous, imperfect pacts that have held the last century in place. As these systems collapse, they also release, creating space for new organising principles, where humans might develop with technology, where Indigenous knowledge is more central, and where the interconnectedness between humans and nature is reaffirmed.” TarraWarra International 2026: System Release is open from 21 March through 5 July 2026. 📷Marco Fusinato, DESASTRES dlce34aza7o1pjlcet7q.jpg, 2024, courtesy of the artist and PALAS, Sydney. 📷Dane Mitchell, Remembering and Forgetting Venn, 2015. Photo credit: Christopher Morris. 📷Nicholas Mangan, A World Undone, 2012, Courtesy of the Artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. 📷Nikau Hindin, Manu Taua Flight as Fight, Pūtara, Betelgeuse, 2023. Photo credit: Manu Aute. 📷Alicia Frankovich Studio behind the scenes, TarraWarra Museum of Art, System Release. Photo credit: Craate Creative 📷Shannon Te Ao, la rā, ia rā (rere runga, rere raro) Everyday (I fly high, I fly low), 2021, three channel video with sound, 6:20min (still).