Sophie Davis

Curator

What thrives on these soils

Abigail Aroha Jensen, Yuki Kihara, Darcy Lange, Jimmy Ma’ia’i, George Watson, Daegan Wells

Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery, 2025

Curated by Sophie Davis

Looking at the legacies and political dynamics of agriculture in Aotearoa New Zealand, What thrives on these soils considered how we might think about growth and prosperity. The exhibition included artworks that illuminate the experiences of workers and the economies of working-class towns shaped by their proximity to farming industries.

The exhibition was developed in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay, where the regional tagline “Great things grow here” promotes an abundance of opportunities for investment, industry, and personal success. Yet the artists in this exhibition complicated this narrative. They examine the realities of working the land—including cycles of economic growth and decline in food and fibre production—and asking who truly reaps the benefits. Their works interrogate global systems of exchange that shape markets for labour and produce, as well as entrenched settler-colonial perspectives that frame the land asa site for individual profit. What thrives on these soils foregrounded lived experiences and histories, and moments of collective resilience—gestures that might, in turn, seed new possibilities.

All images from What thrives on these soils, 2025, installation views at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery. Photos by Brian Culy.

Vital Machinery

Conor Clarke, Selina Ershadi, Janet Lilo, Louise Menzies, Meg Porteous

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2022-23 & Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery, 2023-24

Curated by Sophie Davis and Lucy Hammonds

Vital Machinery explored intersections in the practices of five Aotearoa women artists working across photography and moving image. The exhibition approached the camera not only as a technology, but an extension of the body and thought process.

Speaking to the histories of lens-based practices, the artists in Vital Machinery interrogate the consumption, agency, and stability of the image in a digital age. Present throughout the exhibition were the power dynamics and ambiguities of the camera, exploited to consider women’s experiences of the lens; the entanglement of lived experience and creative practice; and the implications of image capture within histories of colonisation. Navigating the networked world, this exhibition reached inside the mechanisms at play in the processes of representing and recording ourselves within the contemporary moment.

First presented in 2022-23 in Ōtepoti at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the exhibition was revisited and extended with the same group of artists a year later at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery with new and commissioned works.

Central projection: Selina Ershadi, Amator,2019, digital video with audio,35:07 mins.

A selection of photographs by Conor Clarke.

Left: Conor Clarke, Objects in mirror are closer than they appear (Tapuae-o-Uenuku), 2021.
Right: Conor Clarke, Telly Photo, 2022.

Left: Conor Clarke, Landfill (cataract), 2023.
Right: Conor Clarke, Landfall (hourglass), 2023.

Left: Conor Clarke, Veil of the soul, 2018.
Right: Conor Clarke, Angle of repose, 2015.

A selection of photographs by Meg Porteous.

Foreground: Louise Menzies, March, 2022, September, 2022, and November, 2023, Just so you know, 2022, digital prints on silk, wood.

Janet Lilo, Stolen Time II, 2023, photographic installation.

All images from Vital Machinery, 2023, installation views at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery. Photography by Thomas Teutenberg.

On the table

et al., Nick Austin, Ruth Buchanan, Yona Lee, Marie Shannon

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2022

Curated by Sophie Davis

On the table flips the script, inviting a group of artists with work in the collection of Jim Barr and Mary Barr to shape the exhibition.

et al., Nick Austin, Ruth Buchanan, Yona Lee and Marie Shannon were invited to ‘talk back’ to the collection they are a part of by determining the selection and presentation of artworks in this exhibition. In doing so, these artists begin to explore the relationships that have shaped the collection, and the agency of the artist within public and private contexts. These are lively conversations, thinking about intimacy, care, power, and what it means to live with (or around) artworks over time.

The Estate of L. Budd, Michael Parekōwhai, et al.

Michael Parekōwhai, Canis Minor, 2016, (detail), bronze parts, paint, carpet, golf balls.

Yona Lee with et al. Untitled (no human trafficking), undated, spraypaint on wool blanket. Courtesy of Michael Lett.

The Estate of L. Budd, Untitled (pleasure) and Untitled (blind), books, thermometers, both undated.

The Estate of L. Budd, Forgive Descartes, 1996 (detail), blind, suitcase and book.

Patrick Pound, Other Peoples’ Messages, 1992, stamps on canvas board.

Ruth Buchanan, Splits, split, splitting, 2019, pongee wild silk curtains.

Karl Fritsch, Untitled Candlesticks,2012, metal, wax.

Left: Peter Black, Motel Entrance, Napier, 1981.
Right: Marie Shannon, Untitled (American Gothic),1989.

All images from On the table: Artists in the Jim Barr and Mary Barr collection, 2022. Installation views at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Photography by Justin Spiers.

Nature danger revenge

Alexis Hunter, Evangeline Riddiford Graham, Deborah Rundle, Sorawit Songsataya

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2022

Curated by Sophie Davis

Nature danger revenge was an exhibition of paintings by Alexis Hunter (1948-2014) which stemmed from a feminist and environmental consciousness of the 1980s, accompanied by new commissions from artists Evangeline Riddiford Graham, Deborah Rundle and Sorawit Songsataya. The exhibition took Hunter’s paintings of hybrid creatures and environments—and their charged, even apocalyptic, language of expression—as heady ground to explore new horizons, and tangle with different understandings of nature, bodies and desires.

Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, Hunter spent much of her career in London. From the mid-1970s, she became internationally recognised for her photo-narratives that appropriated the language of commercial film and advertising to challenge gender and power relations. In the 1980s, she moved away from photography towards neo-expressionist painting. This remained Hunter’s primary artistic medium for the rest of her working life. In this exhibition, Graham, Rundle and Songsataya consider the agencies between expression and environment in dialogue with Hunter’s works that follow this shift.

All images from Nature danger revenge, 2022, installation views at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Photography by Justin Spiers.

Fire-lit kettle

Annie Mackenzie, Ashleigh Taupaki, Georgette Brown, Imogen Taylor & Sue Hillery, Li-Ming Hu, Salote Tawale

Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2020

Curated by Sophie Davis

Creative energy is frequently spoken about in relation to a particular kind of passion or ignition, from the feeling of an initial spark to a sense of burnout. We often circle around the metaphor of tending a fire when trying to grasp at a question of maintenance—to resources, knowledge and relationships that require ongoing care and attention.

Fire-lit kettle took this language as a starting point to engage a group of artists, motivated by the desire to explore its affective and critical potential. The works included offer different perspectives on how to sustain and understand creative practice, gravitating to what is raw over what is resolved.

Georgette Brown, And Holds Us At The Center While the Spiral Unwinds, 2020, acrylic paint, mediums and rope on canvas.

Li-Ming Hu, Three interviews, 2020, digital video, 10:20 mins.

Imogen Taylor and Sue Hillery, Sluice, 2020, acrylic paint.

Salote Tawale, Creep, 2014, digital video, 03:11 mins.

Annie Mackenzie, Saved Message, 2020 (detail), fruit loaf and voicemail recording.

Ashleigh Taupaki, Toro, piko, 2020 (detail), copper wire, harakeke, natural dye, māta, plaster, found rocks, pink spiral shells, pupu shells, melted glass, aluminium.

All images from Fire-lit kettle, 2020, installation views at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space.
Photography by Cheska Brown.

I digress

David Bennewith, Gregory Kan, Matilda Fraser, Victor & Hester

Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2017

Curated by Sophie Davis

Delving into different modes of address and encounter, I digress explored the transmission of written and spoken language through different technologies as a relational and open-ended activity. The artworks and collaborative approaches of this exhibition considered the forms of labour, exchange and unexpected detours of this process.

All images from I digress, 2017, installation views at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space.
Photography by Shaun Matthews.

Beyond Exhausted

Matthew Galloway, 3-ply and Caitlin Patane

Featuring text works and publications by: Stephen Bram; Hank Bull, Shi Yong, Ding Yi, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai et. al; and Mladen Stilinovic

The Physics Room, 2016

Curated by Sophie Davis

Beyond Exhausted focuses on the idea of the reprint to explore the contemporary possibilities of publishing. While print media may have played an important historic role in feminist, queer and protest movements; the very notion of ‘independent publishing’ has become a more hybrid political gesture and field of enquiry for artists working today.

The artists involved in this exhibition revisit and re-present existing printed documents. In doing so, they question what it is to make something public; negotiating geopolitics, the attribution of authorship and the archiving and dissemination of knowledge— embracing trans-generational, trans-geographical collaboration between artists and introducing multiple layers of ‘re-printing’ through oration, recording and restaging.

Plywood shelf with 3-ply publications, 2016.

Selected reproductions from Reprint #2: Shanghai Fax, collated by Fayen d’Evie
and Caitlin Patane.

Annotated text works selected by Fayen d’Evie and Caitlin Patane, 2016.

Installation by Matthew Galloway.

Matthew Galloway, Out of the Shadows, 2016 (detail), map derived from the CCDU Blueprint, designed by Warren and Mahoney for the Christchurch City Council in 2012.

Matthew Galloway, Art over nature, 2013, and plywood shelf with Silver Bulletin reprints.

All images from Beyond Exhausted, installation view at The Physics Room.
Photography by Daegan Wells.