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The Frances Hodgkins Fellowship is fifty years old. The fiftieth Fellow was recently announced as Campbell Patterson from Auckland. Looking back, the list of artists over those fifty years is a mix of well-known names peppered with a fair number of who-the-hell-was-that? Still it stands as a good example of how representation has changed, well for women anyway. For the first twenty years there were only five women Frances Hodgkins Fellows (so many ironies in just three words) but over the next twenty years this changed dramatically with 45 percent of the ‘Fellows’ being women and over the last ten years, 50 percent.
For people identifying as Maori the situation has been a little less encouraging: six out of the fifty spots. This certainly makes the media release announcing Campbell Patterson’s success somewhat ingenuous. It gives examples of past celebrated winners as ‘Ralph Hotere, Grahame Sydney, Marilynn Webb, Fiona Pardington, Shane Cotton and Heather Straka’. Ok, this selection represents the 50 percent women thing (although over the full 50 years it has only been 38 percent) but to have 67 percent of the list as Maori stars is a plain misrepresentation of who have been awarded the Fellowship. And once you note that Shane Cotton was the last Maori to be awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and that was back 18 years ago, you have to wonder what’s going on. And then, boom! it comes to you. Marketing, got to love it.
Image: Campbell Patterson, 2017 Frances Hodgkins Fellow
Once there was a saying in the art museum business, ‘one garden gnome is a garden gnome, 100 is an exhibition.’ No one we know has tested this idea as thoroughly as Campbell Paterson. Back in 2006, while in his last year at art school, he turned on a video camera, lifted his mother for one minute and 47 seconds, put her down and turned off the camera. It was an intriguing gesture, this reverse Pieta, but having done it once a year since then, eleven years later it has become something else altogether. Both Campbell Paterson and his mother have obviously grown older over the time but so too has the technology. The first ten Lifting videos came on DVDs, packed into those thin plastic gem cases, and featuring a new pic of the curtains that have served as the backdrop to each episode of the series. This year it was another shot of the curtains, the same style of gem case (some things never change), but inside the case was a tiny flash drive instead of a DVD. And of course one flash drive is a flash drive, but another ten …
To end the week we’ve put photos from four more studio visits up on OTN:STUDIO. Hard to believe that it was nearly four years since Don Driver died and to visit the studio now is a very different experience. To protect the work sheets of plastic and plain old bedsheets now act as shrouds giving the studio an even more otherworldly appearance. This set of photographs was taken in August last year. Of all the artists we have visited none has been more generous or welcoming than Peter Robinson. You can now see photographs from a dozen different visits including this one that's new to the site taken in September 2009. Earlier still, another look inside Lillian Budd’s studio in June 2003 and as we subtitle the site ‘artists in and out of the studio’, photos of Campbell Patterson setting up his exhibition at Michael Lett in August last year.
Image: covered artwork in Don Driver’s New Plymouth studio, August 2015
Here’s a catch up on some new studio shots we have put up on OTNSTUDIO. The most recent are from a visit to Kate Newby’s New York studio three days ago. Earlier in the year we were in Michael Stevenson’s Berlin studio as he was getting ready for an exhibition in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (you can read more about the show here). Judy Millar was also getting ready for an exhibition when we visited her earlier in the year. The sculpture you can see in her Auckland studio was to be installed at Te Uru (some great installation shots of the show here on denizen). And finally, photos from John Parker’s studio in Oratia taken in September last year.
Image: Kate Newby in her New York studio, December 2015
