Rachel Walters’‘ Strangelove’ At Wintec Ramp Gallery
Rachel Walters’ work combines handmade found objects – quirky vases, animal figurines and other sculptural objects
blended together by recasting in form that are both strange and familiar. This jarring aesthetic is intended to defy
direct interpretation toying instead with notions of the known and indefinite, playfully questioning issues of cultural
and artistic ownership.
Walters reconfigures some of the composites by casting them and their compounds in bronze. Her deadpan combinations
quietly reference the inferior and the exile, and conjure spooky resonances: wooden pineapples, test tube vases and
oversized salad servers assume poses outside their order and even though sculptural posturing can’t hide their
provenance, they still hint at animism and the potency of the natural world. winning and failing at the same time.
Her exhibition Strangelove opens at the Wintec (Waikato Institute of Technology) Ramp Gallery on Tuesday 13 May at 5.30
pm and runs to May  30.
Rachel Walters was born in Auckland in 1976 and is currently based there. Recent exhibitions include ‘Group Show’,
Michael Lett, Auckland (2007), ‘Prospect – Multiples Cabinets’, City Gallery, Wellington (2007), ‘Hopelessens’, Ledge,
Ramp Gallery, Hamilton (2007), ‘Group Show’, The Blue House, Michael Lett in Wellington (2006), ‘The Orchid Show’, Mount
Street, Auckland (2006), ‘A Dictionary of Clichés’, rm103, Auckland (2005), ‘Group Show’, Bow Arts Trust, London
(2003).
The Wintec LEDGE dates run concurrently with RAMP and features Layla Rudneva-Mackay’s ‘You laugh I smile’.
ends