Nikau Hindin, Salome Tanuvasa, Sam Kelly, Tyler Jackson

Bringing together work by Nikau Hindin, Salome Tanuvasa, Sam Kelly and Tyler Jackson, this group exhibition explores material and form across four distinct practices. Moving between textile, sculpture and object-making, the exhibition foregrounds the physical properties of each artist’s chosen materials and the different cultural, personal and spatial meanings they are able to hold.

Nikau Hindin’s works on aute form part of her wider practice of reviving Māori barkcloth making in Aotearoa. Handmade aute is marked with natural pigments including ngārahu, connecting material practice with mātauranga Māori and her ongoing exploration of celestial knowledge, navigation and relationships between whenua and sky. Salome Tanuvasa’s sewn and threaded textile works similarly privilege material and handwork. Drawing on an intuitive response to her surroundings, Tanuvasa’s practice considers labour, domestic life and the experiences of Pacific communities in Aotearoa.

In contrast, Tyler Jackson works with industrial materials and methods, heating, folding and twisting sheets of translucent acrylic into organic sculptural forms whose changing surfaces respond to light and the space around them. His interest in the highly finished language of Minimalism and the Light and Space movement sits in productive tension with the physical unpredictability of shaping the material by hand. Sam Kelly’s practice, grounded in the carving and shaping of bone, brings another material language to the exhibition, extending techniques associated with jewellery and adornment into sculptural form. Together, the four artists create a conversation between inherited and contemporary material knowledge, and between processes that are tactile and handmade and those that are industrial and constructed.