Artists Selected for 20123 McCahon Residencies

Artists Selected for 20123 McCahon Residencies

The McCahon House Trust is pleased to announce three new artists for the seventh McCahon Artists’ Residency programme at its French Bay residence and studio. Fiona Pardington, Tiffany Singh and Dan Arps were selected from the forty-three artists who applied for the three annual residencies.

Fiona Pardington has gained national and international recognition for her photographic images, which have explored themes of medical and psychoanalytical imagery and more recently taonga relating to her Maori heritage. Over the past year, Fiona Pardington has been working on an extended body of still life photographs. She will work on a new and final suite of still life photographs while at the McCahon Artists’ Residency delving into McCahon’s identification with whenua/landscape around the western beaches.

The work will resonate with her own relationship with her turangawaewae of Te Wai Pounamu/The South Island. Kriselle Baker says the series of proposed still life images interweaving [Fiona’s] sensibilities, work and life experiences with the life of McCahon, his painting and his relationship with the land, will make an extraordinary body of work. Fiona will take up residence in June 2013.

Recently returned from successful participation at the 18th Biennale of Sydney, the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne and a residency at 1 Shanti Road, Bangalore, India, Tiffany Singh will take up the McCahon Residency from November 2012 to January 2013. Tiffany Singh’s influences are varied including modernism, eastern and western spiritual beliefs and ancient cultures. With Maori, Indian and Pacific Island decent, her cultural diversity enables her to draw from a broad knowledge, philosophy and mythology. Tiffany Singh has a desire to build on her participatory practice alongside developing a gallery worthy body of work that sits comfortably alongside her participatory work. Roger Taberner of the Auckland Art Gallery commenting on Tiffany’s practice says … [Tiffany’s] life, belief and art practice intertwined with extensive voluntary work overseas and an interest in how social modes of contemporary art can activate and generate change in society. Dan Arps completes the selection of artists for the seventh residency programme.

His
work explores and responds to the contemporary urban environment. The Walters Prize winner for 2010, Dan Arps installations, sculptures, paintings and videos fuse architecture, public space, nomadic structures, politics and history while expanding on modernist traditions of abstraction, alienation and the everyday. Dan Arps is intending to create a body of work based around an investigation of the landscape and architecture of west Auckland. Photography and research will likely lead to a possible site-specific installation.

Ron Brownson, senior curator Auckland Art Gallery says that Dan’s ability to transform the everyday into the totemic emblems of how people live is extraordinary and reveals each item’s history while delivering it to a new future.

The McCahon House Trust is pleased to welcome the three artists to the residency programme.

The next artist taking up residency is Ruth Buchanan (Te Ati Awa/Taranaki), originally from New Plymouth; she now lives in Berlin and will return to take up her residency in November 2012. In recent work, Ruth has used sculpture, drawing, mixed-media installation, photography and text to construct literary and built spaces. Her work explores issues of identity and the parameters of artistic action posing how cultural heritage shapes understanding art and art making today. She intends to take her work in a new direction investigating the interior as form and concept through detailed portrait-like drawings, watercolours and paintings in the vicinity of the McCahon House and local environs.

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