Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

We Went to the Edges of Time is a new solo exhibition by artist Kathy Barry currently on at Melanie Roger Gallery. 

Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Barry represented Aotearoa on the international stage at the 32nd São Paolo Biennal in 2016, and was selected in 2023 as the recipient of the prestigious C Art Trust Award. Her first substantial survey exhibition in a public installation, Energy Work, with artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, was curated by Christina Barton for Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in 2022. 

In We Went to the Edges of Time, Barry has further explored the mode of making that has underpinned her practice since 2012, where she lets go of artistic agency, letting energy fields guide her watercolour drawings. 

Through a series of geometric mappings, the viewer is pulled into the energetic frequencies of Barry’s work and invited down a pathway of sorts to healing beyond familiar dimensions. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Kathy Barry about the exhibition, her process, and these ideas of relinquishing artistic agency.

Séraphine Pick is one of Aotearoa’s most celebrated painters, with a career spanning 30 years in which Pick investigates human experience through the material language of paint. 

Her paintings circulate this tension between figuration and its collapse, often bringing the figure forth into her ethereal compositions and then dissolving them back into themselves.

This new body of work presented within Paintings continues Pick's exploration of material dissolution and figural density, displaying a rich navigation of material applications. Each work leans into its own materiality, some soft and delicate, while others thick and textural. An act of deep listening and responding to the paintings themselves, with pic circling back to former ways of making through a new lens.

Maya had a kōrero with Séraphine about the show and overall practice. 

Cat Fooks is a Tāmaki based, material led painter who immerses herself within the world of her studio. In which Cat no longer views it as just a physical space but rather its own dimension built up of paint and clutter that is crucial to the making of the works. 

Her current exhibition Didymus Mountain presents a series of vibrant and playful paintings. Little worlds of abstract colour and texture that seem to rebel against the typical convention of the frame. Engulfing the frame itself in a multitude of rich layers of paint, rejecting this ‘framing’ and instead bringing it into the world of the painting itself. Eliminating this space between the painting and the space of the world.

Maya had a chat with Cat about her overall practice and the show.

Maya had a kōrero with poet Liz Breslin about her latest book Show you’re working out.  

Sof had a kōrero with Steve Carr about his current exhibition How to Disappear at Gow Langsford which opened earlier this week.

<3 xx