Sam Kelly and Tom Mackie, Outside / In

Sam Kelly & Tom Mackie, Outside / In
24 October – 16 November 2024
Meet the artists, 2 – 5pm, Saturday 2 November

'Outside / In' presents new works by Sam Kelly and Tom Mackie at Jhana Millers Gallery from October 24th to November 16th. The exhibition explores themes of process, transformation, and material history through both artists' distinctive approaches to form and structure, engaging with ideas of the body and its relationship to space. 

Working from her Ngāmotu studio, Sam Kelly crafts sculptures that combine cow bone and resin. Her practice involves a methodical process of cutting, boiling, cleaning, forming and sanding, transforming raw material into tangled configurations that exist in a space of deliberate ambiguity. The organic forms of her bone sculptures echo bodily structures, creating a visceral connection between material and viewer. Kelly completed her Bachelor of Applied Arts at Whitireia in 2010.

Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based Tom Mackie's works explore the relationship between the contained and the container. His works range from the monumental 6.4-meter multi-layered stretch calico painting that responds to human scale, to intimate paper collages. The hand-carved machine-routed black walnut and MDF pieces are inspired by bora beetle tracks and have a strong affinity with Sam's twisted and tangled bone pieces. Each of Mackie’s pieces interrogates the relationship between frame and content, material and space, inviting viewers to question traditional modes of display and presentation. Mackie studied at the Otago School of Fine Art in Dunedin.

'Outside / In' presents both artists' commitment to process over outcome, each exploring the pause between formation and completion. Their works navigate the boundaries between structure and suggestion, past and future. Throughout the exhibition, the works maintain a constant dialogue with the viewer's body, whether through scale, organic form, or spatial relationship.