'Elysian Fields' Exhibition by Richard and Carole Cornes

Join Carole Cornes and Richard Cornes to celebrate the opening of their exhibition on Friday 9 April, 5-7pm. Professor Emeritus, Roger Horrocks, opens the exhibition at 17:30 on April 9. Roger Horrocks is the biographer of Len Lye, and librettist of Len Lye - the Opera. He has written extensively on Kiwi culture. Light refreshments will be served. 

The following afternoon, Saturday 10 April at 1 pm, join us at CAN for a floor talk by Richard Cornes.

Elysian Fields, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 2021, is an exhibition about journeys in identities. Not just the conscious identities we tick boxes for on census forms, but identities explicit and tacit, conscious and unconscious, dialogues with our pasts, presents, and surroundings. Identities we often do not know, even as we live them. Identities we discover as we age into them. Identities, which are personal archaeologies, intimately linked to, and in dialogue with, our places in the world, professional and personal, temporal and spiritual.

A premise of the exhibition is that artistic expression – whether a simple doodle in a meeting, through to ‘real works of art’ – is the royal road to gaining some insight into understanding why we see our worlds, whether work or personal, as we do. A royal road to uncovering a deep understanding of ourselves, and the communities we are a part of.

The exhibition presents the creative works of: Carole Cornes, and Dr Richard Cornes (a senior lecturer in public law at Essex University in the UK. Carole and Richard’s works are drawings, paintings, and posters. Michael Cornes, Carole’s husband, framed all the works.

Carole’s work is presented as a retrospective, and present, of a life of drawing and painting. For Carole drawing began with picking wildflowers to draw and press, while walking the fields around the English village she grew up in, with her mother and grandmother. Before moving to New Zealand in 1960 she studied at the Birmingham School of Art. Busy through much of the late 60s, 70s and 80s, with raising two sons, and at times working part-time, her art always continued in the background; a space for reflection and meditation.

Richard’s contribution to the exhibition, and the focus of his floor talk – “The Drawing Tutor - Eight Tutorials in Public Law” – is organised around his teaching public law at Essex University over the 2020-21 academic year; due to COVID, teaching he has been doing via zoom from NZ, back to the UK. As he has taught this year he developed images, both expressionist and abstract expressionist, related at least initially, to the tutorial topics.

Richard graduated BA/LLB Hons from Auckland University in 1991, and was then admitted as a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand. During his BA he studied twentieth-century literature with Roger Horrocks (who will open the exhibition), and was a student in the first year Professor Horrocks led an undergraduate course in Film and TV Studies.

Psychosocial research skills, and psychoanalytic concepts developed during his MA study also inspired him to take drawing into the law school classroom. As module leader for the first year public law course (with 500 students), he has opened the teaching year by inviting students to draw a ‘constitution’. He then puts a number of the images onto a visualiser and engages students in conversation about what they see in each other’s work. On every occasion, two things happen. First, students’ images echo themes yet to be covered; tacit understandings of what constitutions do is revealed. Second, entirely novel ideas of a fundamental nature, concerning what constitutions do, arises. Not having the lecture theatre because of Covid, Richard has taken the technique online in 2020/21, with students drawing in zoom tutorials around the world, sharing and discussing their work. Discussion of the use of art in his law teaching and research will be included in his floor talk.