Hand-Held: Turumeke Harrington, Ben Pearce, Hannah Valentine

This exhibition features three sculptors whose practices variously intersect and diverge to create dynamic works built upon sincere considerations of materiality and balance.

Turumeke Harrington moves between objects, furniture, and installation. Harrington’s clarity of form and function is supplemented by a poetic pragmaticism. Her sympathetic approach to materials combines with a bold colour palette to create engaging works, which speak to the artist’s own personal relationships, cultural anxieties, and everyday musings.

Ben Pearce seeks out the strange and unlikely; transposing everyday objects, experiences, and memories to recapture the wonder and imaginative potency of childhood. From moon rocks to fort-building, origami animals and building blocks – Pearce’s ethereal and intimate sculptures appear at once as naive structures, architectural experiments, or remnants from some other time and place.

Hannah Valentine’s wide-ranging practice is pervaded by the human body and its various appendages and gestures. For this exhibition, Valentine presents a series of small-scale sculptures. The artist brings together hand-moulded aspects with utilitarian climbing rope to create two-dimensional forms, the simplicity of composition resulting in a tactile tension between materials.

Oscillating between a robust minimalism and a lightness of touch, the works in this exhibition possess a distinctly graceful quality. There is an acquiescence between the handmade and aspects of mass production, with the incorporation of everyday materials and industrial processes. Harrington, Pearce, and Valentine each operate within and rely upon the mechanisms of a broader community – individually juggling the demands of working, parenting, and whānau to define both a physical and creative space for their practices to coexist.