Festival of Ceramics and Outsider Art Fair Exhibitions

A detail from Sue and Peter Daly-Hughes' Outsider Art Collection. Photo courtesy of Jan Barratt.

MEDIA RELEASE: For immediate release, 11/10/2016

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Contemporary ceramics and an outsider art collection

Corban Estate Art Centre's exhibitions,
October to December 2016

Contemporary ceramics and outsider arts feature in three new exhibitions that open on 27 October at Corban Estate Arts Centre. On display until 11 December, is Sue and Peter Daly-Hughes' extensive outsider art collection showing alongside an installation by Auckland based artists Kelsey Stankovich and Harriet Stockman, in addition to a new solo exhibition by contemporary ceramicist Virginia Leonard.

The two ceramic based exhibitions will be highlighted in the upcoming Auckland Festival of Ceramics. Christmas time at Middlemore is the latest solo exhibition of Virginia Leonard’s visceral clay forms that characterise her experience of chronic pain. Emotive in nature, her life-sized sculptural abstractions endeavour to manifest the concealed presence of pain in the typically unresponsive medium of clay. Leonard in 2015 was awarded a Merit in the prestigious Portage Ceramic Awards.

Meanwhile artists Harriet Stockman and Kelsey Stankovich, who also work with clay materials and techniques, respond to the paradoxical relationship between the history of the Corban family homestead and its current use as a gallery. Their collaborative installation titled like a little sphere of soapsud drifting…attempts to capture the sense of a space that is neither one nor the other through the use of materials and objects; from gas to liquid to solid, fired and unfired, soft and hard, rudimentary and complete, almost…

On public display for the first time will be Sue and Peter Daly-Hughes' unique outsider art collection comprised of furniture, paintings and a wide range of art objects. Amassed over more than 30 years they have a diverse and significant collection. "We collected things from second hand junk and antique shops but also from people of the Hokianga and beyond, who express their creativity through a direct and intuitive connection with their environment. We were like magpies, collecting things that took our eye." This exhibition is in association with the Outsider Art Fair programme.

As part of the exhibitions, on Saturday 26 November there will be a free joint artist talk with Virginia Leonard, Kelsey Stankovich and Harriet Stockman discussing their exhibitions. This will be followed by a specialist talk by John Perry about Sue and Peter Daly-Hughes’ unique Outsider Art Collection. There will be two free art making sessions for kids based on the exhibitions on Saturday 12 November and 10 December in the centre’s ongoing family friendly Saturday Gallery Club.

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