For the 2023 Aotearoa Art Fair, Sanderson are pleased to present a group exhibition featuring the work of Josephine Cachemaille, Liam Gerrard, Julia Holderness, Simon Kaan, Kate van der Drift and Ray Haydon.

Josephine Cachemaille
Cachemaille’s installations are driven by her desire to work through questions and scenarios from her life, often central to her family dynamics. In recent exhibitions This Way, That Way at The Dowse Art Museum 2021, and She’s a Force at Sanderson in 2020, the artist focused on exploring a scenario in the gallery space that focused on a positive future for her daughter Rosa.

Cachemaille’s work has this active and charged quality, as the artist sees herself in ‘collaboration’ with her objects, materials, and media, “It’s not ‘me’ ”, she says, “it is ‘US’”. Cachemaille draws on philosopher Jane Bennett’s concept of “material vibrancy”. This informs her artmaking strategies; by intentionally anthropomorphising objects she aims to increase our awareness of what they are contributing.

Liam Gerrard
Liam Gerrard is a painter whose practice explores the dichtomy between life and death, and the fragility of existence. The artist has most recently explored these themes through the depiction of plants and flowers, or other aspects of life that one can find in a rural or urban garden. Gerrard has become known for his depictions of the hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) in various states of blossom and decay. In recent months the artist has started to explore the moth as subject matter, an insect which has the average lifespan of one to six months. Gerrard is known for the equisite, meticulous detail with which he paints and draws. Notions of the passing of time are made apparent not only through his subject matter and its life cycle but also within these processes the artist employs.

Julia Holderness
Holderness explores archives and their construction of art-historical narratives. Her practice and outputs are often collaborative and she works alongside both historic and current artists. In creating narratives that might or might not have existed – encompassing artists, groups, movements, and exhibitions – her research practice deliberates on the role of fiction in both the collection and interpretation of material histories. She critiques traditionally held divides between art historical scholarship and artistic fabrication. Through the use of invented personae, artworks and exhibitions, Holderness traces alternative histories of modernism in New Zealand. Her installations combine mixed media fabrications, often textile and ceramic making with historical materials from art and design archives.

Simon Kaan
As a fifth-generation New Zealander of Chinese, Maori (Ngai Tahu) and Pakeha ancestry, Simon discusses how his mixed heritage informs his practice. Land, sea and sky images dominate his art pieces, and the waka is a regular motif in his work.

Influenced by the Otago landscape, Simon has been exploring large-scale outdoor design and helping reflect a greater cultural diversity and revival in Dunedin’s urban environment.

Kaan’s work has previously been described as ‘contemporary and timeless’ a notion that seems to fit well with many of the indigenous relationships referenced in his artmaking. Kaan comments that his visual language is something he has continued to refine over the course of his career.

Kate van der Drift
Kate van der Drift is a photographer based in Tamaki Makarau. Van der Drift’s recent work has been an exploration into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains.

Due to colonisation and industrialisation, the Hauraki Plains have been entirely transformed from forested low-lying wetland to a drained and intensively cultivated landscape with an uncertain future.

The artist’s investigation into the topography of the Hauraki Plains had originally manifested itself into the imagery of the physical farmland and the Piako River. More recently the artist has been capturing the physical makeup of the land and water burying unexposed film negatives into the Piako River for a period of four weeks. Over this time, the algae, bacteria, pollution, and sediment in the water reacts with the film, producing clouds of vivid alchemical reactions. The end result is a camera-less image; abstract and expansive, brilliantly coloured photographs emulating celestial bodies and the beyond.

Ray Haydon
Ray Haydon is a sculptor whose career spans several decades in Aotearoa.

One of the physical aspects of Ray Haydon’s sculptural practice is the defining of negative space by the solid objects and forms that surround it. The artist discusses how he is actively “painting” the air with the materials the uses o fabricate his constructions in space.

In the same spirit of the Russian Constructivists like Naum Gabo, Haydon understands and is constantly testing the variable ways that materials such as steel, wood and carbon fibre can take on extraordinary new forms – pure materiality, monochromatic economy and complicated structures made to maximise spatial dynamics.

Purchase your tickets now to view Sanderson's presentation at the Aotearoa Art Fair 2023.

For VIP Preview and Opening Night details, see Aotearoa Art Fair.