Louise Menzies
27 Feb 2025
29 Mar 2025
Purple Cliffs, Blue Hills
In her Stoddart Cottage exhibition Purple Cliffs, Blue Hills, Louise Menzies presents a series of new works developed after her time at Karearea Cottage for the Stoddart Cottage-Purau residency in 2023. Menzies’ title and imagery follow Margaret Stoddart’s example, responding to elements of the local landscape in Pātaka o Rākaihautū Banks Peninsula. In one work, the outline of a 19th century boot fragment floats across a ferry timetable, connecting her wanderings to those who came before her.
Listen to an interview with Louise on RNZ's Culture 101: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/culture-101/audio/2018978088/scarves-ferry-timetables-and-old-boot-fragments-on-banks-peninsula
Her textile works printed as scarves allude to something between the pictorial and the portable, and textiles as markers of personal encounters. These connect the specific – the body that might wear them, the place and time they might be worn now – with ancient practices, continuous through time and across territories. A branch of Menzies’ family have lived on the peninsula since the 1870s, and she has long been captivated by the story of J.H. Menzies’ regular walks from Menzies Bay to Christchurch. Also known as a keen walker, Stoddart’s paintings of Cashmere Hills and Governors Bay picture the terrain these journeys might have traversed.