Ngā mihi to all those who came along to the incredible artist talk with Gill Gatfield and Virginia Leonard!

Gill Gatfield | b.1963 LLB, MFA (Hons), University of Auckland | Waipapa Taumata Rau

Multimedia artist Gill Gatfield creates paradigm-shifting artworks in physical, ephemeral and virtual realms. Through an alchemy of light, matter, space and time, she transforms rare and precious materials into poetic abstract forms. Her sculptures arch, bow, reflect, absorb, suspend, and disappear. As signs, symbols, texts, and figures, of human scale, they invite one-to-one dialogue. Bridging the atavistic and futuristic, Gatfield’s abstract figures probe mythological, spiritual, and political boundaries, imagining decolonised bodies and systems, liminal borders and free exchange. Gill Gatfield has won national and international awards and commissions for site-specific public art.

Her work is exhibited in biennales, art festivals, sculpture parks, and museums in NZ, Australia, USA, and Europe, and held in collections worldwide. Recent projects include: NZ’s first digital public artwork, HALO 2023-2024, a codified stone virtual monument commissioned by Wellington Sculpture Trust, presented by WST, Te Papa Tongarewa and Aotearoa Festival of the Arts; In Absentia 2022, a Global Digital New Work supported by Creative NZ Toi Aotearoa, presented in UNESCO Geopark Kefalonia Greece 2023; and Native Tongue XR 2018-2024, a spirit traveller, exhibited at A’18 AIA New York 2018, Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe 2021, ‘Alter Ego’, Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz Berlin 2022, and European Cultural Centre ‘Personal Structures’ Venice Art Biennale 2022.

—

Virginia Leonard | b. 1965 MFA (Hons), Whitecliffe College of Art and Design | Te Whare Takiura o Wikiriwhi

Virginia Leonard’s ceramic works are ornate, visceral wonders. Her large, vessel-like structures bear some resemblance to everyday domestic items, yet the familiar shapes of vases, jugs, and urns are abstracted, morphed into melting masses. Colourful, sharp, seemingly floral and often gilded, the works have a fantastical quality and an aesthetic sensibility that borders on the Baroque. Leonard cites a visit to the Rococo rooms at the Metropolitan Museum in New York as influential, along with the lavish set and costume design of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. “I just love the indulgence in the ornate. More is more in my world,” she states. Glazed in vibrant colours and dripping with resin, Leonard’s objects are intentionally fired in a way that sees the objects partially slump and sometimes crack. This cracked, slumped, and visually lavish nature of the artworks is part of their meaning to the artist. Leonard was in a serious car accident when aged 20, and she has had ongoing issues and chronic pain ever since. “Pain is in the work – on some level, it’s always about that. I have a relationship to pain, and it is part of my experience. My artmaking is about turning that into something beautiful. It has to be beautiful. The celebration of ornateness is essential for my survival,” she says. This autobiographical content has been central to her work in ceramics, with the pummelling and moulding actions of working clay a means to articulate her personal experience with chronic pain.

After more than a decade as an abstract painter, Leonard made the shift to working with clay in 2013, driven by the need to give a voice to physical trauma. She states, “chronic pain has no biological value, it lacks both language and voice. The language of my clay making is my attempt to rid my body of trauma and reduce my level of chronic pain.” Her works give voice to this physical and psychological struggle, and transform it into something sparkling and ornate. Virginia is represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland.