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Julia Holderness
The Group: Home-wares
Exhibition
Mixed media, 2016
Installation image
Photo: Richard Orjis
$NFS | ENQUIRE
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Julia Holderness
The Group: Home-wares
Exhibition
Mixed media, 2016
Vitrine Installation
Photo: Richard Orjis
$NFS | ENQUIRE
3 / 4
Julia Holderness
The Group: Home-wares
Exhibition
Mixed media, 2016
Vitrine Installation
Photo: Richard Orjis
$NFS | ENQUIRE
4 / 4
Julia Holderness
The Group: Home-wares
Exhibition
Mixed media, 2016
Vitrine Installation
Photo: Richard Orjis
$NFS | ENQUIRE
The Group: Home-wares
Julia Holderness
12 Jul – 06 Aug 2016
Julia Holderness is a designer and artist who produces domestic wares within art narratives, combining factual and fabricated versions of a chosen story. Inspired by lists of pottery items from original catalogues, Holderness revisits the applied arts and objects from the historical exhibition series The Group Shows in Christchurch. Holding annual exhibitions from 1927 to 1977, The Group gained their reputation for showcasing the latest trends in contemporary New Zealand art, including painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, architectural plans, pottery and textiles.
Using the exhibition catalogue lists as an inventory, the fabricated and re-presented ceramic and textile items, foreground and re-focus the objects that were always listed at the rear of these catalogues, Holderness reassesses the position of the applied arts and in particular, pottery and textiles within the arts domain. By revisiting particular epochs in New Zealand’s art history and conflating it with international movements such as the Bauhaus (1919-1933) and Omega (1913 – 1919) workshops, this installation explores appropriation, aesthetic lineages and combines several influential design archives as sources for contemporary fabrication. Tracing alternative and sometimes imagined histories of modernism in New Zealand, this archival installation practice privileges the decorative, domestic and design – categories often overshadowed by the dominant fine art impetus in New Zealand’s art history.
Julia Holderness completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 2002 and a Master of Art & Design (Honours) at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in 2015. She is currently based in Auckland, and undertaking a practice led PhD (Visual Arts) at AUT.
1/2 Day SYMPOSIUM
Sat 30 July, 1 – 5 pm
Object_Memory_Archive: art histories, formal knowledge and the power and problem of what we know
LAWS 105, Law Building, University of Canterbury Ilam Campus
Keynote speaker: Julia Holderness
In this half-day symposium, research relating to the archive, and accepted methodologies for recording art histories and material culture will be examined. With particular focus on how existing frameworks fail to account fully for the idiosyncratic nature of the telling of histories, speaker will consider how a feminist method might create a new and alternative method of archive. Considering questions such as how can both research and creative practices make room for intuition and subjective voice, this reimagining of the archive as an imperfect and malleable system, acknowledges the roles of fiction and story-telling within it. How can we reposition the archive with the potential to support and make heard a range of voices?
Download Programme: Object_Memory_Archive Symposium
This symposium is presented by Objectspace, The National and University of Canterbury. In association with the exhibition The Group: Home-wares, by Julia Holderness, The National, 15 July – 6 August 2016.
The Group: Home-wares is a public exhibition toured by Objectspace, Auckland. Download their exhibition publication here: Julia Holderness PDF