Dream Gardens at Katherine Mansfield's house

After a season at Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Dream Gardens comes to Katherine Mansfield House & Garden to continue the conversation between threadwork artist Cathrine Lloyd, sculptress Emily Efford, and painter Keren Chiaroni in a new setting. The exhibition also features an AV work by Kim Potter.

From the artists:

"The terms of our conversation have mostly been “set” to the music of flowers, (Mansfield), but also to the song of birds, insects, trees, and stars that are composite elements of the garden, and that give that music depth. Kim Potter’s dream-like film sequence admirably captures this organic counterpoint.

But whether real or imagined, growing in colonial Wellington, or painted on a wall, flowers and gardens gave intense pleasure to Mansfield. She wrote about them in stories, letters and journals, and was ready to spend her last sixpence on a posy of violets instead of meat. They gave colour, variety and vitality to the texture of her daily life, and were the stuff of her (impossible) future dreams:

“I shall have a garden one day and work in it, too…And the peony border really will be staggering. Oh, how I love flowers! I think of them with such longing.”

The works you see here have grown from our own dreams inspired by gardens in New Zealand, England, France and Mexico, as well as from gardens in fiction and art that have no geographical coordinates. The writings of Katherine Mansfield were the direct inspiration for Chiaroni’s diorama series (Greenrooms) while the thinking behind Efford’s surrealist-inspired The Flock points to the dilemma of artists and writers everywhere – the ongoing need for solitude coupled with the equally fundamental desire for human connection – a tension with which Mansfield was familiar. Lloyd’s embroidered French Garden was inspired by the French renaissance gardens of kings and emperors, a style of garden seen in the grounds of Fontainebleau today, a short step away from the community where Mansfield spent her final years.

It is Efford’s metal sculpture Plante Insoumise, or, Disobedient Plant, that offers perhaps the best approximation for the spirit of Katherine Mansfield. Her life began under the hothouse dome of a late Victorian parlour, and ended, through its very irrepressibility, by defying constraints and inspiring generations of artists and writers who came after her. I think Mansfield would have liked this work very much."

Some of the works in this exhibition are for sale, with a percentage of the proceeds going to Katherine Mansfield House & Garden to care for the house and its collection.

Exhibition included in admission to the house. For those only wanting to visit the exhibition, entry is free but a donation is always appreciated. Please note our Exhibition Room is upstairs.