Victoria Bell - Paper, Scissors, Rock
The Royal Oak Hotel, Arrowtown

Installed in what is fondly remembered as the Royal Oak Hotel in Arrowtown, Victoria Bell’s Paper, Scissors, Rock has breathed life into the vacant site as the days advance to its demolishing. The pristine shapes of the soft sculpture objects, clean dangling trails and sharp cut leis, hang aloof of the mayhem inside.

“Paper, Scissors, Rock (2002) is a collection of padded fragments, soft scraps, differently sized, pillowlike three dimensional forms. A lei of yellow felt flowers has, at one of its ends, a fragile papier mache cat’s head, mouth open, as though mummified in mid-miaow. This skull transforms the undone Lei into a backbone, a skeletal line. Perhaps this is where, despite the brightness, a sense of unease permeating the whole installation comes from…”
Sally Ann McIntyre

With thanks to David Speight.

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Zane Smith
Fresh Choice Supermarket, Queenstown

What is a list written on? A child's homework, a failed WOF, a used envelope. What other peripheral information exists? The list is an anonymous secretion, adrift and superfluous, it remains a potent insight into the list maker's person. Such documents are never intended for public consumption.

With Zane Smith's installation in Fresh Choice Supermarket, Queenstown, the detritus of the shopping activity has now become the object of our collective voyeuristic leanings. This work engages shoppers as they move through the check-out, and reminds them of their own list, discarded in an isle, crumpled at the bottom of a shopping bag. It challenges the shopping experience to be something other than ordinary.

With thanks to Fresh Choice http://www.virtualqueenstown.com/supermarket.htm

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Ani O’Neill and Megan Hansen-Knarhoi Luncheon
Toyworld, O’Connells Shopping Centre, Queenstown

Ani O'Neill and Megan Hansen-Knarhoi in association with Lindy Rose and Olympia d'Urtz present Luncheon, an installation in the Toyworld window of the O’Connells Shopping Centre.

The pastel ladies peruse the mall in this lip-smacking delicious collaboration between two Auckland artists, O'Neill and Hansen-Knarhoi. Showing definite familiarity with the public sector of art making, these artists are sharing the nutty humour they have developed between themselves, and celebrating the materials and processes around their combined art making practices.
With thanks to Toyworld Queenstown http://www.toyworld.co.nz

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Sue Upritchard
Sky Alpine Queenstown Casino

Upritchard has been collecting, hoarding, and displaying all her life, and the works mimic her everyday obsessions (or pastimes).
When this work was first installed in Christchurch, it was named 7098 CICADAS. This title couldn’t be taken again as the numbers vary, but the same plastic bags filled with crusty little cicada husks hang at the entrance to the Sky City Casino in Queenstown. Hung in a rigid grid, the little shells come alive as the sun courses through the sky light roof and illuminates the shellac hued shapes.

“I love sorting, arranging and displaying objects in my home. My home is my studio; my every day life is my practice.
Not all the things are collected by me. Many by others that have been in or are in our house. Some collections are reluctantly discarded when they become tired and dusty, others captured for ever in a box or behind glass.”
Sue Upritchard

With thanks to Sky Alpine Queenstown Casino http://www.skyalpine.co.nz

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The sites for all four of these works were found without the artist present, and also installed without the artist's guidance. Thank you to all of the artists for your support.

This project has been made possible with the support of Queenstown Creative Communities, and the Market Fund. Thank you to all the local businesses who have generously donated the sites for these installations.

Victoria Bell - Paper, Scissors, Rock
St Andrews Street, Central Dunedin

Installed in a vacant shop window, Victoria Bell’s Paper, Scissors, Rock once again brings new life to its surroundings. Feeding the public curiosity, the pristine shapes of the soft sculpture objects with clean dangling trails and sharp cut leis, hang as marks in space. Pop next door to see Nicola Farquhar’s Brother Rabbit Brother Duck - neighborhood support network.

Paper, Scissors, Rock (2002) is a collection of padded fragments, soft scraps, differently sized, pillowlike three dimensional forms hung … as part of the installation series Gridlocked. This work is a step along from the tracings of [her] drawings, back, for a moment, to form. The organic objects are a double-salvage; their shapes are carefully traced from free drawings, re-solidified matter sourced from ephemeral and arbitrary action. Their materials, similarly, are re-cycled, their fabric re-cut from the substance of chanced-upon objects from two-dollar and second hand stores. They look, at first glance, cute, cartoon-ish, and vaguely comical. Their garish, even tacky, colours exude a cheap cotton optimism. Their shapes and sizes are variable but give the impression of a collective subset, a discrete species. As with all life forms, there are runts, and some are better fed than others. You want to ask what they are called, for such a range of storefront objects must have a branding, a name, and a label. Circular metal eyelets intrude on their surfaces, out of which spool trailing appendages in varying lengths of pink, green and yellow plastic tubing. Bell reveals that in sourcing such materials from sewing stores, she felt as though she were entering the underside of Craft, the domain of women who knit covers for coat hangers, a certain type of domestic making as uncool as flower painting. Elsewhere in the [space], a lei of yellow felt flowers has, at one of its ends, a fragile papier mache cat’s head, mouth open, as though mummified in mid-miaow. This skull transforms the undone Lei into a backbone, a skeletal line. Perhaps this is where, despite the brightness, a sense of unease permeating the whole installation comes from. Or maybe there’s something in the title, Paper, Scissors, Rock.…It is a list, and as such, doesn’t stop, but begins again and again in a songlike chant, loops back in on itself, it’s absence of finality suggesting an endless proliferation of meanings, the mantra of a child’s game of hand gestures whereby, when one becomes an adult, weighty things are still, sometimes, decided, in the random-sense making manner of the I Ching.

Sally Ann McIntyre

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Ani O’Neill and Megan Hansen-Knarhoi - Luncheon
George Street ANZ, Central Dunedin

The perky crocheted poodles enjoying their luncheon in a make-shift butchers on George Street, Dunedin, are none other than the delightful Lindy Rose and Olympia d'Urtz. Ani O'Neill and Megan Hansen-Knarhoi bring us this collaborative installation celebrating friendship, craft, and humour.

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Sue Upritchard - CICADAS
St Andrews Street, Central Dunedin

Sue Upritchard has been collecting, hoarding, and displaying all her life, and the works mimic her everyday obsessions (or pastimes).
When this work was first installed in Christchurch, it was named 7098 CICADAS. This title couldn’t be taken again as the numbers vary, but the same plastic bags filled with crusty little cicada husks hang at the entrance ‘Circle’ on St Andrews St, Dunedin. People react differently to critters, as they do to collections, and Sue’s CICADAS are no exception. The grossed-out and the awestruck come to a standstill outside the window in Dunedin.

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“I can hear a voice in my head saying oh I just had a notion to… And they might've been talking of something slight or something momentous. It is the voice of someone occupied very deeply but secretly with their amusement or fascination in themselves and the world.”
- Ella Bella Moonshine Reed, on Upritchard

Nicola Farquhar – Brother Rabbit, Brother Duck
St Andrews Street, Central Dunedin

Perched on St Andrews St next door to fellow artist Victoria Bell’s Paper, Scissors, Rock, Nicola Farquhar’s larger-than-life felt duo, 'Brother Rabbit' and 'Brother Duck' overlook the street in Central Dunedin. This Hamilton based artist, lecturer and web designer has taken the display case aspect of these installations and produced a work which not only challenges perceptions of our visual relationships with retail frontage, but also shunts her characters into a 24 hour limelight: Brother Rabbit and Brother Duck are caught immobile in the crafty weaving of felt cloth, and hang loftily in their prime positions, overseeing the goings-on of the street.

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Pauline Rhodes – GROUNDPLATES
St Andrews Street, Central Dunedin

“the quick whispery breathing of the newly born idea”

The sound of new life down a telephone line, the quick whispery breathing of a newly born soul – this was what interrupted Pauline Rhodes as she contemplated the notion of Idea.
Rhodes has been making installation art consistently throughout her career, and with a twinkle in her eye loves to tell of her first naughty, opportunist project – dropping a huge, soft, white ball onto the black bonnet of a police car, snapping a picture of the 4 bewildered faces behind the ball, and running off with her ball down the road. GROUNDPLATES, steel plates with the above text welded into them by Connetics, are lying quietly around Christchurch during January and February of 2004 and one has been brought to Dunedin On Tour. The text is perhaps more pertinent to this time of year, when we start to welcome in the new ideas and say goodnight to the Christmas and New Year hangover. But it is also pertinent to the street, to the passing foot traffic, to the dusty footprint planted on GROUNDPLATES. She wants people to think about Idea, about the notion of it firstly, but also the life of it. What happens to a newly born idea? What happens to quick contemplation? What happens to GROUNDPLATES? They can all be ignored, flogged, forgotten, and enjoyed. Rhodes is setting up a discourse, a conundrum: the excitement of a new idea, the “quick whispery breathing”, placed underfoot in a functional, menial disguise.

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As people go about their daily lives, Rhodes is inviting a reconsideration of these small interactions with our environment, and with our imaginations.

GROUNDPLATE can be found on St Andrews St in Central Dunedin, as well as a number of locations around Central Christchurch.

Pauline Rhodes and Gridlocked are very grateful to Connetics for their support in the production of GROUNDPLATES. Once the project has been completed, GROUNDPLATES will be returned to Connetics and the wild, taking back the role they were originally meant for.

The works will remain in Dunedin until mid February. The sites for all of these works were found without the artist present, and also installed without the artist's guidance. Thank you to all of the artists for your support.

This project has been made possible with the support of Dunedin Creative Communities. Thank you to all the local businesses which have generously donated the sites for these installations.
Thanks also to Ri Williamson.