86-96 Victoria Street, Wellington from 29th June-13th July 2013.
Cleave is a community arts collaboration between artist Gabby O'Connor, oceanographer Craig Stevens and curator Katharine Allard as part of the Urban Dream Brokerage project which takes place in Wellington City's empty commercial spaces.
A large, room-filling paper ice shelf at the point before it cleaves into an iceberg has been devised by Gabby and created with help from students of Miramar Central School and the public. It shows nature on a knife-edge - a tilted ice field or ice landscape with crevasses, cracks, movement and bending.
With help from the community, the sculpture will change and grow as pieces are added. The finished ice shelf will be illuminated internally and will be highly visible from the street. Made with thousands of tissue paper sheets, the labour intensive installation has been entirely hand dyed. These elements are then combined to form the iceberg structure.
The materials of the installation being paper and light reflect both the immensity of Antarctica and the delicate balance of the earth system and its changing climate.
This new work builds on from several others in the past, most recently ‘Some Time’ shown at the Corbans Estate Art Centre in 2013 and Gabby's iceberg sculpture ‘What Lies Beneath’ shown at the City Gallery, Wellington in 2011. In 2007 Gabby created a paper avalanche in collaboration with students from Island Bay School which was shown as ‘The Rock Show’ at Toi Poneke.
Cleave has been funded by The Wellington City Creative Communities Scheme with support from NIWA and Nice Blocks.
Sunday June 30th Public Workshops. Limited spaces are available for children aged 5+ to attend one of 2 public workshops at 1 & 3pm in the exhibition space. email gabbyo@paradise.net.nz to book your space.
Friday July 5th Public opening: 4pm A free fair trade organic Lemon Lime Nice Block to the first 96 people into the space.
Sunday July 7th Artist & Scientist talk Presented by Artist Gabby O’Connor and NIWA Oceanographer Craig Stevens in the space at 3pm.
Gabby O'Connor has exhibited in Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Holland, Australia and the UK, and has had artist residencies in Melbourne, Sydney, Hiroshima and Wellington.
She studied sculpture at Victoria College of Arts, University of Melbourne and holds an MFA from the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. Her practice involves process-based site-specific works in paper and light, drawing, making things and the occasional theatre-based collaboration.
Cleave is part of a greater body of work exploring the concept of extreme pressure, which ranges from the production of diamonds to the spatial experience of avalanches, the creation of snow caves and icebergs calving.
She also has 20 years experience of teaching and running community workshops.
Follow her on Twitter @o_gabbyo
www.gabbyocconnor.wordpress.com
Craig Stevens has 25 years as a practising field scientist (Australia, Canada and most recently in a co-appointment between NIWA/Uni. Auckland) leading experimental campaigns in Antarctica, the Canadian interior, Denmark and the NZ marine environment.
He has a growing interest in communicating science to the public. This includes numerous radio pieces and twice being short-listed for the Manhire Creative Science Writing Prize. Further to this he has been a regular speaker and organiser of Pecha Kucha presentations, recently curating an evening on the subject of water.
For more information, images and interviews, please contact publicist Lily Chalmers on 021 0220 4635 or lily@yokoso.co.nz