Saturday 29th July
12:30pm - 3:15pm
Gallery
Free
From L-R Cassie Ringland-Stewart, Caitlin Rose Donnelly and Hana Carpenter. Clare Luiten, Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann and Holly Walker.
Programme for the day:
12:30 - Welcome
1pm – 2pm - Live performance by Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann and Clare Luiten
2pm – reading from Dirty Laundry by Cassie Ringland
2:15 –3:15pm - Panel Discussion: “Can you balance a creative practice with paid work and invisible labour?
2:15 - 3:15pm - Children’s play session with lightbox, facilitated by Kate Stevens West
Live performance by Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann and Clare Luiten
1pm - Gallery
Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann and Clare Luiten will be activating the artwork and the space between as a performance practice of listening and speaking through movement and stillness. They utilise Somatics, Contact Improvisation, improvised dance making and care to offer a consciously embodied experience of the world and their friendship.
Artists Biographies
Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann
Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann’s roots are in Te Waipounamu (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Rangitāne), and her work dances in the space between visual arts, performance and participatory processes, and soft sculpture, as activations of intimacy, and invitational experiences of being-as-community. In 2023 Rachel, as Whānui Moves, organised and facilitated three versions of Camp Move Play – an intergenerational camp of movement, environment, and community, as well as producing, designing and performing in two versions of Hine Downtown – a walking performance exploring urban spaces through the lens of a contemporary urban Kāi Tahu Māmā.
Clare Luiten
Clare Luiten grew up running wild in the far North of Aotearoa before training as a ballet and contemporary dancer. This mix of outdoors and focussed awareness continues to weave their influences in Clare's current practices, centering on bodywork (Craniosacral therapy and Somatic Integration), and Contact Improvisation. She consciously embeds these practices into her parenting to enable her to remain resilient, and most of the time playful. Clare is influenced by her family, the outdoors, her therapeutic work, and movement practices, creating a spiralling and supportive rhythm of rest, activity, community and solo time.
As a partnership, Clare and Rachel have been working together slowly and consistently over the last ten years, since meeting whilst their children were still babies. Their shared love of somatics, Contact Improvisation, movement of all forms, and being outdoors, alongside aligned practices of crafting, making and working with beauty in the everyday, meant that they have a found a rhythm of rolling in and out of artistic projects, community offerings and personal practices in lounge rooms, parks, galleries, beaches and community halls. This collaboration is an extension of an ongoing exploration of the potential of intersecting bodies and domestic objects, informed by somatic, ecological and whakapapa-based philosophies and ethics.
A reading by Cassie Ringland- Stewart
from the publication titled Dirty Laundry
2pm - Gallery
Cassie Ringland-Stewart
Artist Biography
Cassie Ringland-Stewart is a poet with a background in literary criticism. Her writing mingles art history, literature and philosophy with the work-a-day minutiae of being a human with responsibilities and a home full of love. Other current projects include a series of poems about The Lady of Shalott that explore women’s agency and creativity; & work on intergenerational trauma. She is the author, with Kate Stevens West, of The Velvet Rope (2020), a collection of paintings & poems. Cassie lives on the Otago Harbour with her partner Manu & her daughter, Eulalia, She is part of the West Harbour Arts Trust, facilitating an annual art residency in local schools & early childhood centres.
Can you balance a creative practice with paid work and invisible labour?
Panel Discussion
2:15pm - 3:15pm - Gallery
A conversation facilitated by creative non-fiction writer Holly Walker. Featuring dancers, Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann and Clare Luiten; painter, Hana Carpenter; installation artist, Caitlin Rose Donnelly; and poet, Cassie Ringland-Stewart.
While the panel discussion is on, any children in the audience will be kept entertained with a play session using the large lightbox in the gallery.
Artists Biographies
Caitlin Rose Donnelly
Caitlin Rose Donnelly (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Pākehā) is a multidisciplinary artist based in rural Southland with her husband and two children. Her practice analyses being Māori, an adoptee, a mother, and a woman in traditionally male spaces. The whakataukī Ka mua, ka muri, meaning we must look to the past to inform the future, centres her whakaaro and mahi toi. She works for Paemanu Ngāi Tahu Contemporary Visual Arts Charitable Trust, Blue Oyster Art Project Space and her husband's farming business. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Dunedin School of Art.
Hana Carpenter
Hana Carpenter has Scottish, Irish and Danish ancestry, ngāi te Tiriti te iwi. She was born in Te Kuiti, Aotearoa. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with her partner Samuel and their children. She has been a highly commended finalist in the Estuary and Ecology Award and a finalist in the Parkin Drawing Prize, the Wellington Regional Art Awards, the Walker and Hall Waiheke Art Awards, the NZ Painting and Printmaking Awards and the Wallace Awards. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam, Auckland University, and exhibits in Tāmaki Makaurau and Pōneke.
Holly Walker
Holly Walker is the author of The Whole Intimate Mess (2017) and her essays and reviews are widely published. In 2022 she graduated with a PhD in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka (VUW), with a creative nonfiction thesis about the experience of having a family member in prison. Holly also works in a government agency managing a climate strategy team. She lives in Te Awa Kairangi Lower Hutt with her partner and two daughters.
Childrens Play Session
facilitated by Kate Stevens West
2:15pm - 3:15pm - Gallery
While the panel discussion is on, any children in the audience will be kept entertained with a play session using the large lightbox in the gallery.
Kate Stevens West
Children playing with cut outs on lightbox
Kate Stevens West (Kāi Tahu, Pākehā) is an artist who mostly draws and paints, but she does love scissors and the way they slide through the contents of the recycling bin. Her practice revolves around family, those long gone, and those still at her feet. After a long stretch pouring energy into her four children, she resumed a creative practice and her work is now in public and private collections around New Zealand. Recent work explores Kāi Tahutaka, working with historical research, traditional paints and pigments. A solo exhibition will be held at Bowen Galleries later this year.
Dirty Laundry
29 July - 25 August
Dirty Laundry brings together thirteen artists and writers to explore and express their experience of invisible labour: painter & designer, Kate Stevens West; somatic practitioner, Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann; essayist, Bronwyn Polaschek; poets, Cassie Ringland-Stewart & Mary Walker; digital artist & photographer, Johanna Mechen; photographer, Dianna Thomson; painter, Hana Carpenter; installation artists, Caitlin Rose Donnelly & Zoe Thompson-Moore & personal non-fiction writer, Holly Walker.
