Coastal Signs is pleased to present Heels of Mothers, a solo exhibition of new work by Ava Seymour.


Heels of Mothers continues Seymour’s long-standing enquiry into the nature of images in repetition. The exhibition is organised, almost exclusively, around a single subject; high heel shoes. Three large-scale screen-printed canvasses feature various designs – the knee-high boot, the strappy stiletto – as well as snippets of text that reveal their sources as newspaper or magazines. A single small-scale collage, Electric Ladyland (2023), comprises an image of a fluffy white cat and a photograph, taken by the artist in New York in the 1990s, of infamous model and transgender performer Amanda Lepore.

Whether Seymour’s images are kitsch or fetish (or both) they are chosen for their instant recognisability, even universality. The images of high-heel shoes in Heels of Mothers are timeless, even iconic, but the captions are conspicuously old-fashioned.

The printed ephemera that floats alongside the show reveals Seymour’s sources: it is a to-scale scan of one of many visual journals by an unknown author that came into the artist’s possession many years ago. The material comprises collaged scrapbooks of both trends in women’s fashion (in particular footwear) and instances of moral panic around sex-work and gender norms in 1960s Aotearoa mainstream media. 


In Heels of Mothers, Seymour zooms in on a recurring motif in the scrapbooks – the stiletto heel. The high-heel is here explicitly rendered as a symbol of dangerous femininity, the kind of footwear that damages the floor around the baptismal font.

The works themselves are physically imposing, almost muscular in their appeal. Images are lifted, cropped, and exploded into stark, monochrome compositions complete with incidental marks of the collage and screen-printing process.

These are elementary, almost anachronistic, moves yet somehow, in Seymour’s hands, the violence of collage’s cut still offers a potent critique of the effects of advertising in advanced-capitalist society. In a contemporary moment, where advertising has moved to the digital screen, Seymour returns the viewer to the analogue in order to reveal a genealogy of control, in particular the control of women’s bodies, enacted in and through images.

Ava Seymour was born in 1967 in Papaioea Palmerston North and currently lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Seymour has been exhibiting in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad since the mid 1990s. As well as regular exhibitions with her galleries, Sue Crockford Gallery and Peter McLeavey Gallery, her work has been included in significant public exhibitions such as Freedom Farmers, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Unnerved; The New Zealand Project, GOMA, Brisbane, National Gallery of Victoria, and Public / Private; The 2nd Auckland Triennial.

Seymour’s work is included in the collections of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Te Papa Tongarewa, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and Queensland Art Gallery.


Seymour currently has an exhibition, Domestic Wild, at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, the first survey of the artist's ongoing series of cat composites.