Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Lucy Meyle is a Tāmaki-based artist whose practice primarily explores our relationship with animals, examining and questioning the limits of human conjectures about them as a relational investigation, rather than a scientific inquiry. Predominantly working in sculpture and publication, Meyle embraces the absurd, gathering and assembling archives, found objects, drawing, and casting into material relation.  

In her current solo exhibition in The Changing Room at Gus Fisher Gallery, Phone Tree, Meyle has turned her interest in human and animal relationships to moths – reframing moth traps as holders of moth narratives, as inadvertent collectors capturing moth memory, drama, and dreams. 

In Phone Tree, Meyle presents five moth ‘situations’, each embodying a different kind of moth and reimagining its trap into a new form reflecting its potential experience, memory, or navigation of the world as a moth – an act of anthropocentric guesswork of their interiority. Enveloping these situations are large scale ‘drawings’ on the walls made of this moth-eaten looking tissue paper, layered, collaged, and hole-punched, creating this playful exploration of scale within the space. 

Imagining the interior lives of moths in such detail, Meyle has turned these moth traps, as devices of surveillance and control, into portals of reconsideration of our relationships with them, reorienting our preexisting ideas of the lives and world of moths. 

Sof had a kōrero with Lucy Meyle about Phone Tree and her overall practice.

Cosmologies is a new exhibition at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, placing the practices of Nikau Hindin and Naminapu Maymuru-White in conversation with one another as two artists who share an approach to making whereby cosmology is not a metaphor but a material language; a guiding force led by indigenous knowledge pathways; a reference to law, memory, navigation, spirit energy, and ecological care. 

Nikau Hindin (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa, Ngai Tūpoto) is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner. Grounded in matauranga Māori shared across generations, her practice reflects ongoing relationships to whakapapa and te taiao – where ‘being’ is always ‘being in relation’; where knowledge is located in the body, in material, and in time. The heart of her practice centres on the revitalisation of traditional cultural practices from te ao Māori, concentrating on aute as her primary material. A collaborative labour of love, in working with aute Hindin harvests, strips, beats, and soaks its fibres across months into its final cloth-like form. 

In Cosmologies, Hindin presents three beautiful artworks made of aute – one along the wall mapping stellar movements in alignment with the maramataka, and two large quilts hung as crescents encircling Naminapu Maymuru-White’s works within, creating a constellation of cosmology within the gallery space itself. 

Sof had a kōrero with Nikau Hindin about Cosmologies and her overall practice. 

brunelle dias primbs is a painter whose practice explores the notions of the extended self by pointing the lens outwards onto her own personal surroundings and extended environments. Examining her personal orbit, and allowing these threads of connections to form between moments and places in her life.  

In her current exhibition on at Grace Aotearoa, mysterium rationis dias primbs presents a beautiful body of paintings that circulate around her recent family travels. Caught in between moments of awe and admiration, while also finding herself in places of critique on these wider notions of tourism and travel.

The work itself draws from these diaristic images taken by dias primbs on her travels. Imagery of galloping horses, cherubs, monkeys in trees and frescos—humming throughout the show pulling the viewer into this space of temporality. Sitting between the space of the recorded image, and the artist's own memory and feelings of that place. 

Maya caught up with brunelle dias primbs about the exhibition and overall practice.

Studies for a Keepsake is a new exhibition at Gus Fisher Gallery. Tracing the lives and work of pioneering French artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the exhibition is the first time these artists have been shown in Aotearoa.

Working in writing, photography, collage, performance, and sculpture, and associated with the Surrealist movement in the 20th century, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore were visionary artists, activists, collaborators and lifelong partners. As gender non-conforming artists, they defied the social norms of the time. For Cahun and Moore, their art was a form of resistance against the context they were living in, defined by warfare, uncertainty, exile, genocide, and fascist political agendas, and the social norms that followed. 

Their work was virtually forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1990s, paralleling the rise of postmodern feminism, as part of this expansion of understanding of identity politics – acknowledging gender as performative rather than fixed, and refusing essentialist feminism. Showing their work in Aotearoa today, Cahun and Moore’s legacy lives on through their powerful art making and stories of resistance that continue to resonate with viewers a century later. 

Sof had a kōrero with curator Lisa Beauchamp about the exhibition, and the lives and work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. 

You can check out the full events programme here.