Cath Sheard Art

Tag: Patea

  • Thinky thoughts! #BlogJune 30

    I’ve been talking with my friend Penny tonight and, as often happens, the art chat circled back to the roots of our addictive natures, which for both of us led to morbid obesity. We also talked about symbolism in our art.

    Penny asked why the Patea freezing works and cool stores appear and reappear in my art, even when I’m seemingly concentrating on the Hokitika Gorge colours. It’s an interesting question.

    When I was sitting on Alan’s lounge floor in Hokitika contemplating the series of abstract mixed media pieces I was working on I suddenly realised I’d been loosely drawing the shape of the cool stores.

    I’m Patea born and bred and, at 56, have only lived away from here for a few years. I left at 18 and came back at 27. This is home. Growing up, the Freezing Works were central to our lives – Dad’s grocery business depended on them in some ways, friend’s parents worked there, friends expected to work there as generations before them had.

    The freezing works dominated the landscape as we drove into town from the south – a symbol of home in the same way the maunga is. The freezing works is long gone, demolished after a fire. The cool stores remain, long-abandoned and heavily graffitied.

    My addictive nature has its roots in pain essentially, according to Dr Gabor Máte in his book “In the realm of hungry ghosts; close encounters with addiction” and more recently the movie “The wisdom of trauma”. I’ve talked about some, but not all, of that pain before so let’s put that aside.

    For me the freezing works and cool stores symbolise home – not just my town or the family home – but Mum, Dad and my sister. They stand for love and safety or, to put it into an addiction/pain context, those buildings represent anti-pain. No wonder my mind pulls fragments of them out all the time…

  • 2012 as a blogger

    600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 11 years to get that many views. In 2012, there were 57 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 559 posts. There were 129 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 190 MB. That’s about 2 pictures per week. The busiest day of the year was June 10th with 177 views. The most popular post that day was New home office / art room.

    These are the posts that got the most views in 2012.

    Visitors came from 98 countries in all! Most visitors came from The United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom were not far behind.

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  • Getting other people into scrapbooking

    We’ve been celebrating heroes this month at our LibraryPlus. As many of you know, I love to scrapbook – paper, scissors and glue for adults. I decided to make up a ANZAC / Heroes scrapbooking kit for our customers to try as part of our ANZAC events. Lats week a few ladies gave it a try at Patea and tomorrow they’ll be doing the same in Waverley. We had a wide range of ages and abilities in Patea that morning and they all did so well; going home with a finished page they could be proud of.

    This is the basic layout they made. Each brought along a photo for us to copy for them, and we handed them a kit with  a page of step by step instructions. The packs are random colours, but all pre-coordinated so they just have to put it all together. This is my Dad, in 1945, as a young man in the Navy.

  • Two exhibitions due to start

    It’s been busy here lately, so much so that I didn’t even do my weekly post last weekend. And yes, I do feel bad about that -posting once a week isn’t a big ask so how could I miss it?

    I have two exhibitions about to start. The first is works from Legato at the Wallace Gallery in Morrinsville. You can read about it here. I have three works in this exhibition, all three were shown in Italy, along with a fourth which has been sold to the daughter of the man it commemorated. The new owner is very happy with it and I won’t be asking to borrow it to show – they’re all deeply personal works and it deserves to stay put with her.

     

    Roy Lehndorf: taken too young. Cath Sheard, 2010.

     

    The second exhibition is ‘Borderless‘ – 35 talented, NZ Art Guild members join together to illustrate that art is truly borderless. Through unique artworks and diverse medias that show that art is our one true global language. It has no boundaries, it crosses borders between nations and culture. It creates a dialogue between individuals, communication between communities and allows us to see and to listen to each other. Art lets us imagine what is possible, it heals, reveals and transforms. This runs from the 16th to 23rd February at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington. I am sending two works, both mixed media pieces about the now-demolished Patea Freezing Works. Incidentally, someone asked me about the titles of these two pieces – did I mean “working IN or AT the Freezing Works”? No; the titles refer to nature working on the freezing works to reclaim the buildings by growing over them with weeds, rust weakening the structures, birds nesting in the gutters and so on – nature just doing her own work.

     

    Working on the Freezing Works XI. Cath Sheard, 2010.

     

     

     

  • Patea Freezing Works – Freeze Dried

    During the week I finished another of the Patea Freezing Works series, and have one more almost done. All three have the same vibrant reds and pinks in the background, and a lime green accent. The starting point is a series of photos taken by Aaron Cubis, whose work can be seen here. It was very generous of Aaron to let me use his images; some of them are stuck on the wall above where I work as inspiration. My husband looked at this one and pointed out that I have used two different points of view – true, but for me the photo is a jumping off point and these are about colour, texture and pattern, not the geometry of the machinery.

    These three works in the series are off to Hamilton to the Thornton Gallery this week for the ‘One size fits all’ exhibition. It’s exciting to be part of this annual event. Here’s a little bit about the Gallery.

    Their website says: Thornton Gallery has been established in Hamilton since the early 1970’s, is well known throughout the Waikato and Auckland regions. Thornton Gallery is one of the largest privately owned gallerys in New Zealand. Thornton Gallery stocks an extensive range of New Zealand Artists. Along with original art works by New Zealand Artists  including paintings, ceramics, sculpture in stone, wood, copper and bronze, art glass and  jewellery, Thornton Gallery sells New Zealand limited edition prints, reproduction art prints and a large range of imported graphics, both framed and unframed. Quality is an important criteria for the works exhibited in our gallery, along with integrity. We believe that art enhances life and is an expression of being.

    As for the Freezing Works itself, the cleanup has not gone quite as smoothly as hope and is costing around $1 million more than anticipated. Council projects manager Viv Eyberg said the contractors had found more asbestos than expected below the foundations of some of the buildings.  Any asbestos below one metre had been capped with a protective membrane. Once the site was finished and certified there would be soil monitoring and nine monitoring wells set up along the estuary where water samples were taken to ensure no contaminants leached, Mr Eyberg said. Here’s a newspaper article about it if you’d like to know more.

    Freeze Dried 2010