An essay for the 'Elemental' exhibition featuring six artists:
Rowan Giselle Holt, Niki Henipaiaro White, Ruby Wilkinson, Shannon Courtenay, Brigid Allan and Koko.
T E A T A M I R A, Queenstown
Displayed from June 27 to September 3, 2025.
Amidst the rocky seas of life, the urge to anchor ourselves, to reach towards what’s real, can be immense.
And so often, in these moments, nature saves us.
Look to the mountains, it invites. Notice the shape of leaves. Work with the rhythms of the tide.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s extraordinary environment is most generous in this regard, over-delivering on all the beauty and resources and energy we need.
Its elemental forces - earth, fire, water, air - bring us to the foundations of our world, our existence. For many artists, they provide the raw materials for creation. They offer an inarguable touchstone, a point of departure and return. Yet no quest for truth is without peril. As with love, to expose oneself to the elements is an invitation to live deeply, experience vulnerability, and risk a lesson in foolhardiness.
In Elemental, an exhibition at Te Atamira, Tāhuna Queenstown’s arts and cultural centre, a collection of artists from across Aotearoa New Zealand each offer a perspective on the impulse towards the essential.
In doing so, they share a practice of art-making that is in itself a relationship with this environment - drawing from it for materials, honouring it through representation, and finding in it a sense of place.
The dramatic natural environment is similarly dominant for textile artist Rowan Giselle Holt. Her studio is attached to Rakiura Stewart Island’s slipway, its feet planted in Halfmoon Bay with a fat sea lion living below. Her commute is a coastline of curiosities, and crayfish are currency. The township gives way to thick bush within metres.
It’s charming, certainly, yet underpinned by an island community’s remoteness, resourcefulness and utter respect for the ocean - an elemental force that finds a home throughout Rowan’s works.
With a background in fashion and a Master of Fine Arts in textiles, Rowan’s work has long drawn on the language of fabric-making - stitching, weaving - to explore fundamental questions of place, history and connection.
The works in Elemental bring an urgency to this exercise. Using cotton rag paper that’s been soaked, dyed, warped, burned, enamelled and more, she weaves a world of organic, sculptural reliefs.
The criss-crossing of the warps and wefts set the tempo for each work. Where the technical exactness of the korowai is stately and reverent, a limpet undulates as if seen through gently rippling water.
Tree is both rugged and intricate, suggestive of hessian sacking that has been worn out by use.
Elsewhere the weave becomes more haphazard, like the knot of a kelp root wrenched from a rock, or hurriedly patched sails battling a southern storm.
It’s a world at the mercy of time, tides and weather, where the inescapable forces of nature bring life, character and chaos, and demand attention.
We - creatures of the earth, blessed and burdened with consciousness - live with our pendulum of truth and doubt. We seek hungrily for what is essential and real. But the second we touch it, we test it.
These are artists whose work is drawn from but does not replicate the natural world. They extend the dialogue, exploring light, texture, gravity. They ask how we fit into this space, how to do it justice, what to make of it.
Inevitably, the meanings we ascribe are projections. But in doing so, we give ourselves the time and space to look closely, to consider. To be.
PRAYING
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
Mary Oliver
Nicola Mutch holds a BA (Hons) in Art History and Theory, a PhD in corporate social responsibility (including arts funding) and was previously an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times. She now lives in Wellington working as a communications specialist in the science sector and maintaining her interest in the arts and the natural world.