New Plymouth based artist Chauncey Flay will exhibit his latest project Vestiges at Kina NZ Design + Art Space opening 15th February 2019.
Vestiges
Noun: a mark, trace, or visible evidence of something that is no longer present or in existence.
The project has been in progress for the last year and brings together a diverse range of materials including coral, concrete, brick and stone. Last week I visited his open-air studio to view the final pieces selected for the show and see his working spaces. I came across various cut stone remnants, ochre rich brick dust waiting to be combined with building compounds, polystyrene covered in resin, bags of cement and the largest chunk of coal from some woman in Huntly!
Throughout Chaunceys travels he has acquired fragments of stones/materials from various locations and they each come with a story. The brick works titled Morven II and III are from a homestead severely damaged in the September 2010 earthquake near Darfield in Canterbury and never rebuilt. His reconstruction of the bricks played with the ideas around ‘Home’ in the context of the deconstruction of the earthquake and its effect on the family who had not only owned the homestead but also the Homebush brickworks.
Before returning to Taranaki in 2017 Chauncey spent six years in the Cook Islands. The natural architectural structure of the coral found on the shores feature in his Coralscape series and have been created on several trips to the Islands in the last year. The natural coral has been adversely affected by climate change resulting in Chauncey trying to reconstruct it into a ‘complete’ form by introducing manmade materials such as concrete, builders bog and polyfiller.
Chauncey turns commonplace materials into objects with value and meaning, completely shifting our appreciation of them. His works have long been admired in our design store setting and we are pleased to host his first solo exhibition here at Kina Artspace.
We will host an opening reception on Friday 15th February from 5-7 PM. Come along and support our local artists and the art scene New Plymouth has to offer.
“In all my works there is a physical process of breaking and putting back together. The language of geometry references architecture as a healing and rebuilding process. The faceting of stone is a slow and meditative reductive process that expresses the relationship between matter and time.”
