Tender Webs
15 March - 15 April 2023
Xin Cheng (Chinese)
Zoe Thompson-Moore (Pākehā)
Georgina May Young (Te Ūpokorehe, Whakatōhea, Pākehā)
This exhibition celebrates our connections to the living environments we make our homes in.
The artists featured in Tender Webs look closely at the green and growing places around them. They use video, publications, installation, and textile work to show us what they see. Familiar places like gardens, friend’s houses, and ancestral lands become lively beings to take notice of, befriend, and collaborate with.
Xin, Zoe, and Georgina observe specific habitats, and take part in processes (like composting, DIY-ing, setting out food for slugs, and carefully applying uku and thread) that entangle their own lives with the many strands of life that surround them.
When this show was forming, I was thinking of the way a spider makes its web, and observing the tendrils of vines that were growing and curling around neighbouring plants and structures. Webs and tendrils are processes that enable living things to cling to one another. Living threads wander, reach out, and pull the world closer...
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The extended exhibition text for Tender Webs is under development - check back later on :-)
Photos
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Artist Bios and Works List
Xin Cheng (Chinese) works across art, social design and local ecologies. She was a co-director of the artist-run space RM in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2007 - 2012), holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hamburg University of Fine Arts (DE), and currently teaches design at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland.
www.xin-cheng.info www.localmaking.org
@urbanepiphyte
Seeing like a forest (2019)
Moving image with sound
A seedbag for resourcefulness (2019)
Printed publication (five booklets in paper pouch)
Zoe Thompson-Moore (Pākehā) was born in Christchurch and grew up in rural Canterbury. She now lives with her family in Te Awakairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt.
@piecewerk
The ties that bind (from Open-field) (2022)
Last summer's plant ties cut from old t-shirts
Woolgathering (from Open-field) (2022)
Nails salvaged from rotting pallets once used to hold motherload-motherlode compost heap (2017-2018)
Spell it out (2023)
Wood salvaged from the neighbourhood worm farm, slug trails
Georgina May Young (Te Ūpokorehe, Whakatōhea, Pākehā) was born in Ōpōtiki and is now based in Ōtepoti. Her practice is centred on loom, garden, needle, and thread. Young's work is informed by the process of time: intricate layers weaving literally and figuratively between ancestral knowledge and optimistic futures. All hail Mother Dirt!
@georgina.may.young
Garden e hoa
Cotton thread embroidery on handwoven linen stained with uku from Ōhiwa.