Yukari Kaihori’s work is made with scavenged materials, which are then cast, transformed into new versions of themselves. Items gathered from the area outside of Ashburton Art Gallery—acorns, magnolia cones, sable fern leaves and agate stones—are cast in pewter, wax, and aluminium. Materially distant from their wet, now decomposing, organic origins, they become fossils within an accelerated process of change. Their presence in some ways troubles the sanitised gallery context: what constitutes ecological wellbeing in this deeply interior, windowless space; how does it relate to the outside world? Or a more pressing question within Yukari’s practice, informed by the idea of a more-than-human world: what forms of liveness exist both within and outside of the building?


Yukari 海堀 Kaihori is currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau working on her Doctoral degree at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland. Her work concerns ideas of the more-than-human-world and the immediacy of mundane places. Recent exhibitions include wiggling together, falling apart, Michael Lett Gallery and Touching Time, Audio Foundation, both in Tāmaki Makaurau, 2022; The moon and the pavement, The Physics Room curated show at Ashburton Art Gallery, Hakatere, 2022; The Quiet Place I Search For: In situ (ɪn ˈsɪtju /室/ Shitsuしつ) at Meanwhile, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2022; In Searching for Deities at RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2021; and we painted the wall with cracks, play_station, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2020.