The Ashburton Art Gallery presents an exciting and innovative exhibition programme, regular floortalks, free children's educational activities and music & performing art events throughout the year.


Summer Pottery Show (Cash & Carry)
Opening: Saturday 8th December 1pm

Need Christmas presents for friends and loved ones? The Ashburton Art Gallery can help. What a better gift than an original piece of pottery by a New Zealand artist. The exhibition will feature works by more than 20 New Zealand potters including Neil Hay, Dave Walker, Michael Michaels, Amy Michaels, Gaye Morton, Graham McEvoy, Marie Rusbatch-Dawson, Averil Cave, Linda Pringle, Rosemary Thompson, Gill Gane, Sally Connolly, Diann Register-Stout, Darryl Robertson, Ngaire Van Grondelle, Royce McGlashen, Shona Clarkson, Peter Stewart, Ann Pullar, Hugh Rickard, Frederika Ernsten and more


Kathryn Mitchell
Holy Shop
8th December - 27th January 2008
Opening & Artists talk Saturday 8th December 1:30pm

Having worked in the gallery sector over the past eight years and from both a publis and a "grass roots" vantage point, I have become interested in the way rt galleries are evolving. One works with an ongoing process of justifying the functions and value of art galleries in communities. "Alana Heiss, a pioneer of alternative viewing spaces and currently the director of MOMA's P.S. 1 in Long Island City, wants the museum/gallery to make you feel as if you're in the presence of God. In the late 1970s Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, the architects of the Pomidou Centre in Paris, described the new institution not as a museum but as a centre of information and entertainment.


Olav Nielsen
Afterglow
8th December - 27th January 2008
Opening & Artists talk Saturday 8th December 1:30pm

Long dusky shadows, a coll lone breee and a warm amber glow, one feels a sense of solitude, of journeys traveled and of a future yet unknow. Mystery lurks in every dark corner and crevice, the viewer is privileged to capture glimpses of unoccupied interiors that speak of a human presence which has recently departed. Nielsen utilises the burnished aquatint and more recently the mezzotint printmaking process to capture the careful and labourious architectural detail in the works. Both techniques are based on the principal of wlrking manually into a textured surface. On completion of the drawing the plate is inked an printed onto paper. Nielsen comfortably moves between the traditional and the contemporary emphasising that one is shaped by history, by the experiences and memories which are retained and reconstructed in order to navigate a possible future.