Autumn Collection - Featuring John Lyall & Christine Hellyar

Fe29 Gallery is proud to present our varied Autumn Collection, featuring John Lyall and Christine Hellyar, along with a number of other Fe29 artists. The feature image, Copper Moa, an oil stick drawing on heavy paper by John Lyall, is one of several works included from his 2002 series, A Moa, A Math, A Mount – the oil stick drawings.

John Lyall was born in Sydney, Australia in 1951 and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Sydney College of the Arts. Moving to New Zealand in 1983, he gained a Masters in Fine Arts (First Class Honours Sculpture) from the University of Auckland (1993/4), receiving the Fowlds Memorial Prize awarded to the pre-eminent Fine Arts Student (Elam). New Zealand iconography is front and centre of Lyall’s art practice. His preoccupation with the moa stemmed from his early days in Aotearoa when he happened upon a BBC team filming a Japanese doctoral student in Fiordland. This student, convinced that the birds were not extinct, had made a sounding device that supposedly replicated the moa call and sent amplified, computer-generated ‘moa calls’ across the fjords – unsurprisingly, to no avail.

Born in New Plymouth in 1947, Christine Hellyar completed a Diploma in Fine Arts (Hons) at Elam in 1970, spending the next 15 years teaching art at the school. Exhibiting consistently both nationally and internationally, her practice involves wall art, sculpture, and installation. One of few New Zealand artists still casting their own bronzes, Hellyar also works with a wide range of materials from found natural items such as grass, hibiscus, stones, and clay, to fabric, plaster, latex, and lead. In our Autumn Collection, we include mainly mixed media works of Hellyar’s from 2015 – 2022.

In the living areas, a number of new oil paintings by Kristin O’Sullivan Peren are also on display. From her Mata-au series, these works include a large oil on canvas, and a series of small, framed oil paintings on archival acrylic. Rounding out the exhibition are linocuts by Robert Macdonald, sculpture and gouache paintings by Hamish Horsley, and sculpture by Tanya Ashken, Marté Szirmay and Jim Wheeler.