Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Bold Types is a new book cataloguing the indie bookstores of Aotearoa New Zealand. It was released on the 2nd of October through Ugly Hill Press.

Bold Types is a collaboration between Deborah Coddington, editor Jemma Moreira and photographer Jane Ussher, and is a tribute to booksellers, publishers, writers, photographers, illustrators and readers alike. It is currently #8 on the top 20 Nielsen Indie bestselling list.

Beth had a kōrero with Deborah and Gemma about the process of creating Bold Types over two years.

The Secret Life of Plants is a new group exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery. 

The exhibition borrows its title from the 1973 book, with the same name, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The book documents “controversial experiments that claim to reveal unusual phenomena associated with plants, such as plant sentience and the ability of plants to communicate with other creatures, including humans.”

Exhibiting the works of Rosa Allison, Georgia Arnold, Heidi Brickell (Te Hika o Papauma, Rangitāne, Ngāi Tara, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Apakura), Ruth Ige, Tessa Laird, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Star Gossage (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Ruanui), Ann Shelton and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, the artists embrace “the secret life of plants” within their practises with works exploring ideas of mysticism, healing, growth and spirituality.  

Sofia had a kōrero with gallerist and curator, Melanie Roger, about the show, the artists, and its themes.

Sofia had a kōrero with Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha) about New Painting, a new exhibition at Gow Langsford Onehunga.

Beth caught up with Professor of Visual Art at the Auckland University of Technology, Dr Christopher Braddock, about Resetting the Coordinates, the first anthology/reader of performance art of Aotearoa New Zealand.

For Stage Direction, Alice Canton joins us in-studio to chat to Moss Paterson about Tempo Dance Festival, on at Q Theatre until the 20th October. 

And, as always, your weekly Arts Guide!

New Painting is a new exhibition at Gow Langsford Onehunga by Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha) opening tomorrow.

Cotton is an internationally renowned artist whose career has spanned over three decades. His practice is underpinned by recurrent questioning of his own bicultural identity, and our collective cultural identity in Aotearoa. 

In these new works, Cotton explores the collision of Indigenous and European time systems, placing ancestral figures in surreal, cosmic landscapes, exploring hybridities, transformation, and the nature of history.

Accompanying the exhibition is an essay by writer Anthony Byrt, Super Radiance, which explores this new body of work further. You can read Byrt’s essay here.

I had a kōrero with Shane about the exhibition and the ideas behind these works.