Unsettling Nairn Street

Erica van Zon is currently exhibiting at Nairn Street Cottage as part of Unsettling Nairn Street, a City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi pop-up exhibition bringing together seven artists across one historic house.

Inspired by Richard Shaw’s writing on Pākehā whakapapa and colonial legacies, the exhibition invites Heidi Brickell, Paula Collier, Riki Pirihi, Isabella Lepoamo, George Turner, Daniel Unverricht and Erica van Zon to respond to the cottage, its material history, and the layered narratives held within the house and the whenua on which it stands.

You’ll find Erica’s work, The Joke is On Me (2013–26), in the kitchen.

Drawing together food-related sculptures made across more than a decade of Erica’s practice, the installation considers the kitchen as a lived space and the things that accumulate within a home over time. A carefully sewn pizza sits alongside rough-hewn clay cheeses, a cast-bronze cracker and other works from Erica’s own accumulated archive.

The cottage’s transition from family home to museum also raises questions about collecting: what gets thrown away, what gets kept, what gets shown, and what disappears when the ephemera of everyday life is removed. Erica fills the kitchen back in with her own unruly collection — objects accumulated through years of making, clashing in material, scale and form, but connected by food, domestic life and the habits of keeping.

Unsettling Nairn Street
Nairn Street Cottage
Open Saturday and Sunday, 12–1pm and 2–4pm.