Jo Hickey
Jo is an accomplished sculptor and photographer, currently working mainly in bronze.
After basic training in Wellington, she spent six months honing her sculpting skills in a workshop in Paris – a city which delights and inspires her.
Since returning to her native New Zealand, she has joined a group of like-minded artists who gather annually in the Wairarapa to work together, transforming wax originals through to their finished state in bronze. At other times, her sculpting is done from her workshop in Wellington.
Jo is driven by a fascination with representing the creative opportunities that arise from the study of the human form in different contexts and by the technical challenges that flow from this. Her work traverses the territory between the literal and the surreal, engaging the viewer with its accessibility and then shifting their perception slightly towards an other-worldly interpretation.
Jo has previously exhibited her scultpure and photography very successfully.
Tony Stewart
Tony is a self-taught artist He is originally from the UK, but has lived in New Zealand for many years, initially in Wellington and now Hawkes Bay.
Tony was born with synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which certain senses or stimulations merge within the mind.
Tony's particular form of this condition is known as Time/Space synaesthesia. In his case, it manifests itself by an involuntary association between time and colour. The days of the week and months of the year are each represented in his mind's eye by a sensation of a ribbon floating in space with patterned colour squares. The imagined colours are vibrant and constant, but the interweaving patterns within these colours are nebulous and hard to define.
In the portion of this exhibition dedicated to the idea of Time, Tony has attempted to reproduce his synaesthetic mind's eye as faithfully as possible, not as an abstract but a figurative representation.
Although primarily a portrait artist, he paints a broad range of subjects in a realistic style. In recent years he has been undertaking private commissions.
Time Pieces is his second exhibition.
Evan Thomas
Born in London in the UK, Evan is the son of a Welsh civil servant and a Yorkshire coalminer’s daughter.
He has been a BBC newsreader, journalist, traveller, playwright, song-writer, IT professional, salesman, technical author and factory cleaner (though not in that order).
He has made his home in New Zealand and currently lives in Wellington, where he has been a regular performer of his poetry.
It is Evan’s hope that his work will appeal to everyone, not just an elite niche of intellectuals. He aims to combine accessibility with sufficient depth and complexity to reward repeated reading. And he’s keen to point out that “some of it’s just for fun”.
Evan will be reading selected poems from his book: "Every Ticking Minute" each day of the exhibition at 12:30pm.