Iteration 9

December 2020 - February 2021

Stella Brennan + Yukari Kaihori

Stella Brennan invited in by Layla Rudneva-Mackay and Yukari Kaihori invited in by Sandra Bushby.

Stella Brennan’s work deals above all with navigating the space and time between human subjects. She pries open history, its losses and possibilities, interrogating colonialism, industrialization and computerization.

Her new project Dear Louise started with a question about an old painting hanging in her uncle’s house, leading to the discovery of her great aunt Louise Laurent’s life as an artist in Auckland in the 1890s.

Born in France in 1873, Louise’s life spans the family’s emigration to South Australia, her pregnant mother’s solo journey with three young daughters to Auckland in 1877, life in Kingsland and Karangahape Road in the 1880s, art school, marriage and life as mother and orchardist in Māngere.

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Yukari Kaihori is primarily interested in the notion of “here and now”, which is the tenet of zen by working with given sites and immediate environments - which place ground us to a specific time and space that is nowhere else.