Category Archives: Collaborative Art

THREAD BETWEEN DARKNESS & LIGHT

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Thread Between Darkness & Light
Stella Brennan
Essays by Susan Ballard, Kirsty Baker, Lissa Mitchell and Ross Galbreath.
Designed by Alice Bonifant.

Thread Between Darkness and Light, a new photo book by artist Stella Brennan, began with the gift of a painting: a depiction of Rangitoto with a mysterious ruin in the foreground. Investigating its painter led Brennan to an 1897 photograph of her great-great-aunt Louise Laurent with her female classmates – students at the same art school Brennan attended a century later. Struck by this uncanny affinity with her previously unknown ancestor, Brennan embarked on a journey of research and revelation.

Cold-calling long-lost relatives, she unearthed an archive of Edwardian glass plate negatives, which a cousin had carefully preserved since Louise’s death in the 1960s. Despite being cracked and marred by mould and dirt, Brennan meticulously scanned the 300 fragile plates. Her first realisation of Louise Laurent and her husband William Winn’s 100 year-old archive was an immersive installation of 36 translucent silk banners, displayed in 2023 at Te Whare Toi, City Gallery Wellington.

This book delves deeper into these historical images, juxtaposing the passage of time with startlingly contemporary framings and content. There is even a string-assisted selfie of Louise and William together. On the other hand, the extreme damage sustained by some of the negatives, the cracked glass, peeling emulsion and blooms of mould speak to the time between then and now.  It is this tension that animates the project – this superimposition of time and place. An evocative collaborative essay enlarges the historical and material context. Susan Ballard, Professor of Art History at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, Kirsty Baker, Curator at Te Whare Toi, and Lissa Mitchell, Curator of Historical Photography at Te Papa, bring their unique perspectives to a text that breathes life into these spectral images.

Brennan’s documentation of her discovery process is complemented by historian Ross Galbreath’s riveting account of Louise’s adventurous mother Lucie, tracing her journey from birth in a London workhouse, to the 1871 Siege of Paris, to her arrival with her three daughters in 19th-century Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Thread Between Darkness and Light is not just a photobook; it’s a poignant bridge across generations, a tapestry woven from the traces of the past into the light of the present.


June 2024

ISBN: 978-1-99-116524-4

Pages: 120pp, with colour reproduction
Format: hardcover wrapped printed cloth, section sewn
Dimensions: 268 x 207 x 15mm
RRP $50.00

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There Is Nowhere to Go, There Is Nothing to Do

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There Is Nowhere to Go, There Is Nothing to Do
Greta Anderson with essays by Hanna Scott and David Eggleton

“In Greta’s images ordinary things radiate mystery, haloed by an ecstatic glow. Her pictures traverse eerie latitudes; they are brushed by the phantasmagoric; they pulse with a visceral brightness.”
At the Edge of a Dark Forest, David Eggleton

This book brings together a selection of photographs produced between 1997 and 2022 by Tāmaki Makaurau based artist Greta Anderson, a prolific photographer, film maker and musician. For over a quarter century, Anderson has been capturing dramatic scenes in films and photographs that quietly reference intensely personal narratives. There Is Nowhere to Go, There Is Nothing to Do presents Anderson’s works, covering genres as wide as portraits, still life, wild and domesticated landscape and suburban tableau. The book is curated and designed by New Public, offering a fresh juxtapositions of images from a wide range of series and one-off artist books Greta made over the decades, from the classic Stand-ins (2001), Uncomfortable Conversations (2005), Optimistic Tragedy (2008), to more recent No Hording (2021) and The Transcenders (2021).

The book features two newly commissioned essays by long-time friend and supporter of Greta’s work, Hanna Scott, and esteemed poet laureate David Eggleton.

Listen to Greta Anderson’s strange, psychically charged images of the ordinary Culture 101, RNZ – fun-facts-filled interview with Greta Anderson by Mark Amery.

Greta Anderson is an Aotearoa New Zealand musician, photographer and teacher. She exhibits regularly at Two Rooms Gallery in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland. Her work has been shown at many venues for international contemporary art and photography including The Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), The Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), The Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, Florida) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).

David Eggleton is a writer based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. He was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 -2022. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2016. His books include Towards Aotearoa: A Short History of Twentieth Century New Zealand Art; and Into the Light: a History of New Zealand Photography; and Ready to Fly: the Story of New Zealand Rock Music; and Seasons: Four Essays on the New Zealand Year. He is a regular art reviewer for a variety of publishing platforms.

Hanna Scott met Greta Anderson as the newly-minted Interim Director at Artspace on Karangahape Road in 2002. She has written about Greta’s work four times over two decades. Twice for the NZ Journal of Photography, for Landfall and for Art New Zealand. Hanna is an experienced contemporary art curator, programme manager and researcher, based in Tāmaki Makaurau since 2002. Her writing is published in broadsheets, magazines and books in Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand and the USA.

New Public is a design and publishing project based in Tāmaki Makaurau. It collaborates with artists and institutions to exhibit research devoted to the discussion of contemporary visual and material culture. Titles include On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies in the work of Joyce Campbell, Sternberg Press, Berlin, and Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2020; Qianye Lin and Qianhe ‘AL’ Li,Thus the Blast Carried It, Into the World 它便随着爆破, 冲向了世界, Coastal Signs and New Public, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2021; The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics, Kerber, Bielefeld and Berlin, 2022.

2023

ISBN: 978-1-99-116522-0

Pages: 128pp, with colour reproduction
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 288mm x 220mm
RRP $50.00

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A garden is a long time

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A garden is a long time
Annemarie Hope-Cross and Jenny Bornholdt

The photographs in A garden is a long time take us beyond the perimeter of the Central Otago garden where they were created. Incorporating processes and materials from the darker, more mysterious corners of early photographic history, the images offer an account of the life and sensibility of a remarkable artist, Annemarie Hope-Cross (1968–2022). With Jenny Bornholdt’s poetry and prose treading deftly around the edges of Annemarie’s life and photographic work, A garden is a long time is a meditation on time, light and the spaces we all inhabit.

For Annemarie Hope-Cross, photography was, at once, a science and a miracle; the camera was an echo chamber and each photograph was a place where past and present met, where the living communed with those lost along the way, and where the most ordinary plants and objects were rendered mysterious, at times radiant. These photographic exposures, and the words that accompany them, are the heartfelt measure of an hour, a day, a season, a lifetime.

Published by Te Herenga Waka Press in association with Rim Books.

Annemarie Hope-Cross was born in Upper Hutt in 1968, obtained a Diploma of Photographic Arts from Whitecliffe Art School in 1989, and in 2011 and 2013 studied photogenic drawing, wet and dry plate collodion and the daguerreotype technique at the Fox Talbot Museum in the United Kingdom. Between 2010 and 2021, she held 13 solo exhibitions at public and private galleries in the Otago region, and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in New Zealand and internationally. She held an artist’s residency at the Fox Talbot Museum in 2013), and her series of ‘Still’ photographs is in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. With Eric Schusser, she produced two photo-books, Still Intrusion (2019) and Dissolving Margins (2020).

Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, most recently Lost and Somewhere Else (2019). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago, during which time she met Annemarie Hope-Cross.

ISBN: 9781776920839

Pages: 152pp, with 90 colour photos
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 250mm x 200mm
RRP $50.00

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For all wholesale orders and requests ithwup@wgtn.ac.nz

Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto

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Motutapu
Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto
Foreword by Zoe Black, essays by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson, Stan Wolfgramm and the artists
Designed by Shaun Naufahu and Giordano Zatta

Presented as an exhibition at Te Uru and as this publication, MOTUTAPU is the conclusion of a four-year journey by artist Benjamin Work and photographer Brendan Kitto. This project looks at the shared history of Motutapu (sacred island) throughout Moana Oceania – including Tongatapu, Rarotonga and at the entrance to the Waitematā Harbour here in Tāmaki Makaurau. Motutapu is a place of sanctuary. Positioned at the entrance of great harbours, straddling the open ocean and the mainland, it serves as a gateway for navigators arriving and departing on voyages. The lifting of tapu and making things noa took place on Motutapu, allowing navigators to continue with their journey back to their closest kāinga, even if it was generations later.

Work and Kitto’s inquiry into Motutapu was initially centred around the shared name. What soon became apparent was a deeper connection to their own hohoko/ʻakapapa (genealogy) as they travelled to three of the Motutapu locations and connected with key knowledge holders. Motutapu has become a metaphor for Work and Kitto as a starting point for these personal journeys. Through Work’s paintings and Kitto’s photographs of their journeys, combined with the introductions to the three Motutapu locations by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson and Stan Wolfgramm the book offers, for the extended diaspora of Moana Oceania, a way for reconnection and reconciliation and as a reminder of what joins communities across time and space.

“Motutapu reminds me of the Tongan practice of Tauhi vā (to nurture or maintain relational space), as a metaphor of this sacred in-between space, an island straddled between the deep moana and the fonua of the mainland . . . When Brendan and I first embarked on this journey we were unaware of where this would lead us, but we now know this was a journey of restoration, healing and connection – to moana, fonua and ultimately with ‘Otua.”

Benjamin Work

“. . . Pita Turei, Paul Johansson and Stan Wolfgramm, who generously offered to guide interactions with each island, . . . The stories imparted by each knowledge-holder were offered through worldviews that leave space for multiplicities of knowledge, championing shared understandings that centre the question ‘What do you know it to mean?’. Their collective research offers an appreciation of three locations that have immense importance personally, while respectfully leaving space for others to tell their stories of these lands.”

From the foreword by Zoe Black

RRP $70.00

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Card-cover, perfect bound | 176 pages (indigo 130gsm Satin Matt) Cover (270gsm Bagdad Brown) 203mm x 254mm portrait
Limited edition of 250
ISBN 978-1-99-116520-6
Publication: August 2022

For all wholesale orders and requests info@rimbooks.com

Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto Book Launch, 2pm 6th August 2022, Te Uru.

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Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto Book Launch, 2pm 6th August 2022, Te Uru.

The exhibition MOTUTAPU, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (11 June – 11 September 2022) will be completed by the launch of the book of the same title by Benjamin and Brendan, at 2pm, 6th of August at Te Uru, 420 Titirangi Road. All invited.

photo: Brendan kitto
photo: Brendan kitto
photo: Brendan kitto

Motutapu: Benjamin Work and Brendan Kitto.
With foreword by Zoe Black, essays by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson, Stan Wolfgramm and the artists. 176pp soft cover, 203mm x 254mm portrait, designed by Shaun Naufahu and Giordano Zatta and published by Rim Books. Limited first edition of 250 copies.

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde

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Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde

Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima
Published by Massey University Press

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde brings together award-winning novelist Paula Morris and seasoned photographer Haru Sameshima. It is the second in the kōrero series of picture books edited by Lloyd Jones, written and made for grown-ups, and designed to showcase leading New Zealand writers and artists working together in a collaborative and dynamic way.

In Shining Land Morris and Sameshima focus on the New Zealand journalist, poet, fiction writer and war correspondent Robin Hyde, exploring three locations important to her difficult life and ground-breaking work. This beautifully considered small book richly rewards the reader and stretches the notion of what the book can do.

‘Like the best picture books, Shining Land is short and physically beautiful; the narrative and the images are inseparable and entirely complementary; it’s a book to read in a single sitting, and return to. And, like the best picture books, it opens up vistas well beyond its relatively modest scale.’ — Sarah Shieff, Academy of New Zealand Literature

“As I try to write about Shining Land my words keep breaking its incandescent magic (shining), its accumulating moods. The photographs are uncanny, eerie, both empty and full, empty of human presence because Robin is missing and missed. The storm chasers outside the frame. I keep imagining Robin entering the scene. I like that. When I look at the shot of Rangitoto ki te Tonga D’Urville Island and Te Aumiti French Pass from French Pass Road with gloomy skies and greys I become grey state. I like this so much. How can I speak? This is where pregnant Robin posed as a married woman, before moving to Picton and then back to Wellington with her secret baby and and her secret heartache. I am on the pass looking down at the grey isolation. I will never know Robin, I will never be in Robin’s shoes, but I feel. And that is what Paula and Haru do. They feel Robin in the depths of their looking and their making. It is contagious.”–– Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf

ISBN: 9780995131828
Massey University Press
12/11/2020 96pp 257 x 200 mm Hard cover

RRP $40

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Many things were not in the fantasy

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Many things were not in the fantasy
Concept and Images: Solomon Mortimer and Zahra Killeen-Chance

‘Many things were not in the fantasy’ compels fact and fiction to play off against the family album. It is a collation of fragments from the relationship of Mortimer and Killeen-Chance that offer a slippage between their private lives, personal practices, and collaborative escapades. The eighty‐six plates they have produced together over the past three years resists a linear sequence and narrative logic. The banal domestic and public spaces have a non‐specificity that disrupts the notion of a fixed identity. Their performative inquiries remain an ambiguous record of Mortimer and Killeen‐Chance from 2014 to 2017.


Design: Solomon Mortimer
Printed: Taiwan
Size: 102mm (w) x 129mm (h)
Paper: light weight offset. About 40-50gsm, white
Binding: section sewn and glued
Cover: PVC pocket 
Pages: 200

RRP $40

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Dull Ache

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Dull Ache
Photography by Fiona Lascelles and poetry by Jasmine Gallagher.

Designed and published by Back Space Books

Dull Ache is a small photobook offering a place for readers to meander and seek solace. It was created by photographer Fiona Lascelles, in collaboration with poet Jasmine Gallagher. First published in early 2020, it is now in its second edition, and these are the last few hand numbered copies that will be available. It has been shown at both the Wellington Photobook Fair and Melbourne Artbook Fair in March 2020.

The following quote by Sally Mann guided the development of the interconnected words and images: “As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things … and I see them at the same time … The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay.” Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

The images are quiet, and while made in a period of grief, they are not an expression of sadness but a moment for pause. And the poetic fragments are brought together to form one long poem, which meanders through the pages, forming a conversation with the photographs. This form of ecoGothic poetry responds to the hope found in nature, as a source of solace: where death is revealed not as an ending, but as a crucial part of the endless cycle of regeneration.

The dust jacket unfolds to a secret image, a secret garden, a place of contemplation. A postcard with this image is also included should the reader be willing to share their own thoughts, extending the conversation.

Jasmine Gallagher is a poet, art critic and doctoral candidate at teh University of Otago, where she is reserching landscape mythology in contemporary New Zealand art and poetry.

Fiona Lascelles is an Auckland art director who photographs the quiet and unassuming moments she encounters while going about her day.


RRP$50

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softback with jacket| 50 pages
165 x 210 mm
#28 from the first edition of 30
2020

Hinemihi: Te Hokinga – The Return
Hamish Coney and Dr Keri-Anne Wikitera
with contributions by Jim Schuster, Lyonel Grant and photographs by Mark Adams
The journey of the carved house Hinemihi o Te Ao Tawhito (Hinemihi of the old world) is one defined by cataclysmic events and the unpredictability of elemental forces.
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