A View Through
9 May 2025
1 Jun 2025
Anna Perry and Mirabel Oliver
In A View Through, Anna Perry and Mirabel Oliver offer an invitation to see the domestic realm through different lenses. This joint exhibition is about perspective – a view through domesticity, motherhood, and the seemingly ordinary moments that compose their lives as women navigating both domestic and artistic roles. Through Perry’s paintings and Oliver’s textiles, we are offered a vantage point, one that looks through the surface of daily routines to expose the often unseen labour, emotional depth, and generative potential found within the everyday textures of home. Out of the busyness within the home, stillness and richness are revealed.
Mirabel Oliver’s traditional needlework plies together the two daily threads of art and domestic life. Her markings and embroidered forms emerge directly from the textures of her daily life as a mother and artist working within the home. Utilising found and inherited textiles – grandmother’s shawls, wedding napkins, vintage haberdashery – she stitches together a visual language that honours matrilineal heritage and the fragmented, repetitive nature of domesticity. Her hand-stitched taatit bedcover, grounded in ancestral craft and folklore, becomes a powerful symbol of warmth, security, and enduring connection to her whakapapa from the Northern Isles of Scotland. Oliver’s textiles are not separate from the ‘dishes, washing, dust, apples, cheese, crumbs’ of daily life, but rather emerge from these very moments, displaying the inherent richness of domestic realm.
Anna Perry’s paintings view the home as a vessel, focusing on windows as liminal spaces that frame our perception of the world and our place within it. Inspired by historical depictions of women positioned at windows, Perry’s work captures the inherent tension between domestic containment and the yearning for connection beyond the home’s boundaries. Her paintings explore the window as a metaphor for time, transition, and the complex interiority of domestic life. Rather than justifying the importance of art rooted in the domestic, Perry’s paintings are affirmations of women’s experiences and the often-invisible emotional labour that sustains society beyond the home. Through considered compositions, her paintings transform familiar scenes of the home into sites of contemplation and quiet power.