Gabby O’Connor, All The Colours

Image credit: Gabby O’Connor, All the Colours, All the Light, 2017-2023, The Dowse Art Museum, 2021. Photo by Mark Tantrum.

A large tessalated structure of polygonal shapes floods the walls of the gallery in a prismatic wash of fragmented colour. Gabby O’Connor’s immersive, site-responsive sculpture employs theatre lighting gels – normally used with stage lights to add dramatic colour to scenes on stage – to transform the white walls into a riot of harlequin-patterned hues.

Here, O’Connor scales-up the properties observed in ‘diamond dust’– ground-level clouds of ice crystals that refract and reflect light. This creates a macro interpretation of this meteorological phenomenon, which to the naked eye resembles a shimmering sky full of tiny diamonds.

Diamond dust can be observed in Antarctica, which has the extremely cold temperatures needed for it to form frequently. O’Connor has spent time on the continent, in 2015 and 2016 researching sea-ice crystals with oceanographers from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). Given the shifting, impermanent nature of light, and the installation itself, a metaphor can be drawn between this luminous work, and the fragile beauty of the complex Antarctic climate.

Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, installation artist Gabby O’Connor’s current research interests involve working with scientists and communities to communicate the connections between art, science, climate and place. Gabby has worked on many collaborative art-sci projects that connect climate change research/ers with art audiences and wider communities. These projects have resulted in participation in Antarctic oceanographic research in McMurdo Sound with scientists from NIWA, Auckland University, and the University of Otago in 2015 and 2016, resulting in a series of exhibitions and publications with the project Studio Antarctica. These Antarctic trips, used for conducting artistic and scientific research, helped to inspire works such as All the Colours, All the Light.

All the Colours, All the Light was first shown in 2017 at the Islamic Arts Festival in Sharjah. It was subsequently shown at the Dowse Art Museum in Wellington, and the third iteration of the work is now being shown at Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum. O’Connor’s practice works closely with the architecture, its limits and possibilities to transform site, materials and the spatial experience of the audience. She uses research of geographic location to inform the installation process, and so each time this work is installed, it changes shape to fit the gallery’s architecture.

Originally from Melbourne, Gabby studied sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts and gained a Masters of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Select exhibitions include City Gallery Wellington, Pātaka Museum+Art, Enjoy, Toi Pōneke, National Library of NZ, Corban Estate Arts Centre, Physics Room, The Suter Art Gallery, The Otago Museum, Sharjah Art Museum UAE, and The North Wall UK and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne where she was a resident artist in the late 1990s. Gabby is currently completing her transdisciplinary PhD research project, The Unseen, with a touring exhibition, workshop series, and thesis supported by the Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge NIWA and the University of Auckland.

On Wednesday 19 March at 6pm, Gabby O'Connor will have an artist talk at the Gallery and Museum with Adele Jackson to discuss art, Antarctica, and Gabby's exhibition All the Colours, All the Light. Adele Jackson is a multidisciplinary environmental artist, researcher and educator based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She has worked in Antarctica since 2013 in roles including base leader, conservation team field assistant, expedition photographer and nature guide. Adele holds a PhD in Antarctic studies; her thesis examined the value of contemporary visual artists working in Antarctica. She is an adjunct researcher with the University of Tasmania and recently joined Canterbury Museum as Curator Human History with a specialism in Antarctic art and culture.

On Thursday 20 March from 10.30am – 12.30pm, we will be running a community workshop with Gabby at the Gallery and Museum in which visitors have the chance to make their own iceberg collage and learn about Gabby's research about icebergs and Antarctica. In this workshop visitors will use a lightbox to create an iceberg collage from repurposed materials. This workshop is free to attend and tamariki under 12 years of age must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. Visitors can drop in anytime from 10.30am.

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