Public Seminars Term 2

Seminars can also be streamed online- see link at bottom of page

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Thursday 2 May  |  Hannah Joynt 

Serious Whimsy

In this seminar Hannah will reflect on her painting practice from the last four years, where she explores notions of absurdity embedded in the everyday. She paints scenes of ordinary human activities and objects juxtaposed in ways that attempt to give visual form to the destabilising experience of absurdity. For her, absurdity is often a peculiarity caused by encountering something or someone(s) in an unintended context. This contextual overlapping (both digitally and physically) in contemporary life offers a seemingly endless source of subject matter. Compiling the subjects found in contextual slippage into painted scenes is her tiny action reordering the world in a picture of serious whimsy. 

Hannah Joynt is a contemporary visual artist and educator who works in a range of media, processes, and scales, from digital illustration to oil painting, pastel drawing to laser cutting. Her practice is often informed by our ever-changing relationship with landscape and the natural world. As a solo practitioner she has exhibited both nationally and internationally and to date has had 19 solo shows. In 2009 she won the COCA Anthony Harper award for Contemporary Art, and she was 2010 winner of the Edinburgh Realty Art Awards, Dunedin. She also works collaboratively in projects across art and design disciplines; of particular significance is her ongoing collaborative artist duo with multimedia artist and musician Dr Jane Venis. Their collaboration includes live performances of drawing and music created in dual improvisation and performance art video works under the collective name Small Measures. In 2019 they undertook the Buinho Creative Art residency in Portugal. Recent shows include Drawn to Sound at Ashburton Art Gallery in 2019 and Dual at CICA (Czong Institute of Contemporary Art) Museum in Seoul, South Korea in 2020. In June 2021 their five-minute film Flag Plant was screened as a part of the Bomb Factory Artist Film Festival in London, while Precious and Pathetic was part of Suite 2023 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Hannah is a senior lecturer in the College of Creative Practice and Enterprise at Otago Polytechnic where she has taught art and design since 2007. In 2021 she was recipient of the Ako Aotearoa Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching. 

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Thursday 9 May  |  Jane Dodd 

The Family of Jane Dodd 

Jane will discuss her jewellery and processes in creating an exhibition project shown at four different venues over three years. Called The Family, the exhibitions presented jewellery within a scientific framework – using jewellery to illustrate the science and using science to inform the jewellery.  

Jane Dodd trained as a jeweller at Unitec in Auckland in the early 1990s, following which she joined the influential jewellery collective Workshop 6. From this context she established an independent studio practice, distinct for her technical skill and unique formal language. While her early practice was focused largely on working in metals, more recently Dodd has explored a wider range of materials extending across bone, shell, stone and wood. In 2009 Dodd returned to her hometown of Dunedin, and she continues to exhibit her work throughout New Zealand and internationally. Current work explores the tensions between historic decorative traditions and the natural world from which materials are largely gathered. 

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Thursday 16 May  |  Leoni Schmidt 

Ten Thousand Suns: A Report on the Sydney Biennale 2024

 This year’s Biennale of Sydney is jointly curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero. They write that “Ten Thousand Suns conveys divergent images. A singular life-giving body known, like the world it shines light upon, has otherwise be known under thousands of different words in as many languages. … The image of many suns evokes projections of a scorching world, both in several cosmological visions and in our moment of climate emergency and of a world ablaze.” This seminar reports on the themes which emerge across the six venues of the biennale in Sydney, while also considering the curatorial decisions made and how the biennale bounces off other exhibitions in or adjacent to these venues. 

Leoni Schmidt is an art historian and theorist, writer, reviewer, and postgraduate assessor. She was the Head: Dunedin School of Art (2009-2017), Director: Research & Postgraduate Studies (2017-2022) at Otago Polytechnic and the DCE: Academic at the Otago Polytechnic International Campus in Auckland (2019-2022). A full professor since 2006, she is currently professor emerita at Otago Polytechnic/Te Pūkenga. Her research focuses on contemporary visual arts practice with an emphasis on political agency. 

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Thursday 23 May  |   Jay Hutchinson 

Landfill 

Jay Hutchinson will talk about his art practice and its evolution spanning the last 20 years, including the MFA project “A Patchwork Orange”, completed in 2008 at the Dunedin School of Art, and recent projects at the Suter Art Gallery, Dowse Art Museum and Olga Gallery.

James Dignan wrote in the Otago Daily Times (3 March 2022): “Hutchinson’s works subvert the norm, not by simply making high art from low art, but by making high art from scrap. While this makes us reappraise the everyday, it also posits the thought that rubbish, in all its accumulated glory, will become the epitaph of this civilisation, a Rosetta Stone or Bayeux Tapestry from which our history will be deciphered.”

Jay Hutchinson is a New Zealand artist based in Dunedin. He graduated from the Dunedin School of Art with an MFA in 2008 and works with numerous mediums including hand-embroidery, performance, drawing, video and fabric construction. Hutchinson has shown throughout New Zealand and Australia at a number of private and public institutions. Hutchinson’s work is held in a number of public collections including The Dowse Art Museum, Suter Art Gallery, Otago Museum, Hocken Collections, Eastern Southland Gallery and Aigantighe Gallery.

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Thursday 30 May  |  Eliza Glyn 

Eliza Glyn grew up in Dorset, UK, and studied visual art and contemporary dance and choreography at Bennington College, USA. Her studies and work took her around the globe where these experiences have fed into an extensive painting practice. Glyn’s oil on board paintings feature landforms as abstractions. Forms appear to float within a colour field of rich earth tones. In contrast, her work on paper, mostly studio still lifes, explores a more physical technique of expression in moment by moment mark-making that imbues the image with vigor and presence. Glyn has recently begun a series of self portraits that overlay the faces of formative figures in her life with her own reflected image. 

Eliza Glyn’s work has featured in Art New Zealand and in major art awards including the Cleveland, Hope and Sons and Aspiring Art Award, of which she was a runner up in 2023. She resides with her partner and two daughters in Dunedin and works fulltime from her studio in Port Chalmers. 

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Thursday 6 June  |  Nick Austin 

Recent Projects 

Nick will give an illustrated talk about some recent projects, connecting these to activities as a student and graduate in the mid-2000s, with the concern of thinking about sustainability of practice.

Nick Austin graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology in 2001, and a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2004. He has been exhibiting work for 20 years in artist-run spaces, commercial art galleries and public institutions, across Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu and further afield. He works in the traditions of surrealism and deconstructionism, at the intersection of art, poetry and comedy.

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Thursday 13 June   |   Kate Fitzharris 

You & I are earth 

Kate’s art practice is predominantly concerned with clay and ceramics, and the relationship we have developed with this material across time. She will discuss this in the context of her recent projects. The title of this talk is drawn from the inscription on a dinner plate from 1661, found in modern times in a London sewer.

Kate Fitzharris has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Dunedin School of Art and lives in Waitati. Recent projects include Suite 2023 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, The Commons at Dunedin Botanic Gardens (2021) and Can you pick me up (with Georgina May Young and Bekah Carran) at The National, Christchurch (2024). She has completed several residencies, including the Doris Lusk Ceramic Residency, Sarjeant Gallery’s Tylee Cottage Residency and Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park Residency, Japan.

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*Seminars can also be accessed online via this link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NzU4MDc2MTYtNzM1YS00NTJmLWIzN2UtYTdhN2NmOTI5OTFj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22450e6824-88ab-4ad2-914d-b0f385da600c%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2248906f9c-eee2-474e-acb8-7720ac92f8fc%22%7d