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Eade Gallery will present the first of their Emerging Artist Solo Exhibitions in May, 2021 with 'Dreamscapes', an exhibition of watercolours by Thomas Geddes.

A solo exhibition can be a daunting process for established artists let alone an artist who has not shown their work before. Rex and Melanie Eade of Eade Gallery work alongside the artist for months mentoring them through the stages of preparing for their exhibition.

Thomas Geddes has been chosen as their first emerging artist for his refreshing and unique approach to the use of watercolour, the reasoning behind its use, and the surreal quality of his inherently New Zealand landscapes. He recently graduated from Whitecliff College of Art and Design in Auckland. Thomas Geddes will often change mediums to better suit the work he is making. In recent years, alongside watercolour, he explored the moving image through sculpture and installation. Different media allows different ways of approaching questions around the animate nature of the world, the ways we interact with our environments, and the seemingly arbitrary distinctions we draw between nature and humanity, self and other.

Dreamscapes will be on show from May the 2nd at Eade Gallery, Holloway Street, Clyde. 

We love to hear news of the significant successes of our Central Otago artists on a national and international level and are excited to report that Te Papa Museum of New Zealand has purchased an edition of Annemarie Hope-Cross's Still Series part of her larger body of work entitled The Heidelberg Project. These nine images were the first works Annemarie made in response to her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

We asked Annemarie to tell us more about these images, the inspiration and the processes which led to the creation of her collection of works.

The Still series came about because I was diagnosed with breast cancer on 10th August 2017. The diagnosis came two days after my 49th birthday and the date of my grandfather HHC's birthday. The next morning I woke at 5.15 am remembering the pharmacy museum bottles at the Heidleberg Museum in Germany which I had visited in 2002. Those Pharmacy museum bottles had been in my mind as something I wanted to make images about, but I was never quite sure how....at 5.15 am on the 11th of August 2018 I could visualise these images.

The series was intrinsically linked to my diagnosis. I knew I would need chemo, major surgery and radiation. All these hideous things meant I needed to focus on creating something positive, as I was able. I was exhausted - making slow images with a mousetrap camera to create photogenic drawing paper negatives, with exposure times of up to eight hours allowed me periods where I could rest in between.

The bottles, inspired by the Heidelberg Pharmacy Museum prompted recollections of bottles of photographic chemicals from my grandfather, a bottle of perfume my father gave to my mother...bottles are receptacles for many things, healing herbs and medicines, nourishing creams, food and wine. To me, they speak of memories and are perhaps allegories for life.

Inherent in my photogenic drawing images are the links to Lacock Abbey in the UK where I learnt the photogenic drawing process - the first photographic process from which a positive image can be made. William Henry Fox Talbot the inventor of the photogenic drawing process, and the first photographic process from which reproductions could be made, inspires me. I was mindful of some of his early camera images in the making of this series. He was very interested in botanical specimens too, as am I, hence their inclusion in these and many of my other works. The Still Series and more of Annemarie's photographic works can be viewed on her webpage www.annemariehopecross.com.