Pieces Spaces Species takes its title from a collection of non-fictional writings by the author Georges Perec titled (in the original French) Espèces d’espaces. Perec’s non-fiction, his novels, theatre, crossword puzzles and other works too, explore spaces close to hand; bedrooms (and beds), corridors, apartments, towns, cities, the countryside, the pages of an open book and the headspace turned over in our memories and imaginations. The three artists in this exhibition, who all work with clay, share an affinity for Perec’s close attentiveness to the many ways different people, and the more-than-human, pass from space to space in daily life, forming distinct habits, rituals, vessels, anecdotes, lists and encounters.
About the artists
Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye
Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye is an artist and spatial designer of Senegalese/European descent based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Yana’s practice is a poetic and collaborative inquiry into material and immaterial temporalities across human and more-than-human scales. Through iterative and ritualistic processes, these temporalities are speculated upon through site-responsive installation, artefacts, gifting and trace documentation, piecing together fragments of genealogical and geological stories.
Lucy Hill
Lucy Hill studied at Dunedin School of Art/Te Pūkenga, graduating in 2022. Hill’s work explores the day-to-day environments around her home in Ōtepoti through sculpture, ceramics and walking. Her SITE 2022 installation Creatures of Earth was an immersive collaboration between hand and clay evoking the relationships between human and non-human worlds.
Taarn Scott
Taarn Scott is an artist from Ōtepoti who graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with a BFA (Hons). Scott is interested in the tactile and the poetic. Recent exhibitions include the group show (Grow)home, Anteroom, Ōtepoti and Ngā Hau o Tāwhirimātea with Hana Pera Aoake and Riki Gooch, Enjoy, Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Scott has also collaborated on a series of exhibitions with Aoake and Wesley John Fourie: Invasive Weeds (or I wish I could give you the world, but I was only given mud, rot, and the bones of a half-eaten fish), The Physics Room, Ōtautahi; The Future of Dirt, RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau; and An Endless Sky of Honey, Meanwhile, Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
