Coastal Signs is pleased to present The Farm, a solo exhibition of new work by George Watson.

The Farm evolves from Watson’s McCahon House residency at the end of last year and includes new sculptural work made in Titirangi and in Tairāwhiti Gisborne, where the artist is based. As always, Watson’s material language is diverse and distinctive. Architectures and articles of containment –fences and gates, chains, meat hooks– recur in The Farm, as do delicate natural materials such as dried flowers and grasses, and materials used to bind the human body. The new exhibition includes works made from rabbit fur, sheep skin, barbed wire, beeswax, silk ribbon, spray-paint, salvaged fence posts, and decorative fretwork from Victorian villas.

Watson invites the viewer to attend to her chosen material’s physical properties and metaphoric potential, and to sit with the discomfort as they rub up and snag against one another. Take for example Fields (2024), a pair of crude bodices or strange instruments constructed from old timber fence posts laced together with soft silk ribbon. Or Homeschooled (2024), a wall work that features three fur stars, some that appear blood-encrusted, ensnared behind spiky wire-netting, mounted on a pressed tin tile edged in lace.

As well as paying particular attention to the creative output of early settler society –its architecture, fashion and literature– Watson also appropriates material from more recent representations of this period in popular culture. One of the many subjects of the artist’s research during her McCahon House residency was Jane Campion’s 1993 film, The Piano, famously set on the wild beaches and dense bush of the Waitakere ranges. In the new exhibition, The Piano and it’s characters join the many colonial and indigenous histories that twist and tangle in Watson’s work.

A screen-printed film still –of Anna Paquin’s character screaming in the rain at the penultimate moment of violence in the film– is one of two figurative elements in the exhibition that centre the figure of the child. The other, Lapita Lolita (2024), comprises a number of hand-made wood fired tiles, based on Victorian roofing tiles and using clay dug up from sites around West Auckland, delicately imprinted by a child’s hand. The hand-prints transform the tiles into mementos of innocence, while also referencing to a darker history of child labour in brick and tile production in Aotearoa; the Dickensian misery of the industrial revolution imported into New Zealand in the name of progress. A timely reminder that, both then and now, the prosperity and liberty of some groups are contingent on misery and subordination of others.

The Farm is accompanied by a text by Manon Revuelta, available in the gallery and online during and after the opening. 

George Watson (b.1986) is an artist based in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, with Ngāti Porou and Ngāti Mutunga whakapapa and Moriori hokopapa. George has a Bachelor of Media Arts from Waikato Institute of Technology, Honours in Art History from the University of Auckland, a MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, and in 2019 completed the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon, Portugal. George was a 2024 artist in residence at the McCahon House Artist Residency.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Beauty Incarnate, City Gallery Wellington (2023); Filial, Envy6011, Pōneke Wellington (2022); and Kōtiro Emepaea, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (2022). Recent group exhibitions include: Like a broth, like a cure, The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch (2024); Aotearoa Contemporary, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2023); He Rāwaho (with Peter Simpson), Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2023); and Hau Whakatonu, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth (2023). 

For further information, please contact the gallery.