Lorene Taurerewa - Strangely Beautiful
"My four times great grandmother in the 1800s wrote and illustrated letters home to Ireland about her life in a "Strangely Beautiful" land.
I liked the way she recorded and shaped her narratives in pen on paper, similar to my own way of working.
The drawings in this show are guided by a series of pen drawings titled "Life in a Box", a kind of daily drawn visual diary, recording narrative imagery in pen on paper. Drawn from memory, popular culture, family narratives and everyday existence, these drawings have taken on a life of their own, including characters and scenes shaped and formed from imagination.
The large charcoal drawings are an extension of the pen drawings, a re-imagining of the characters into new narratives. The pen drawings are the life force of my practice and over time has accumulated into a large cache stored in a box, hence "Life in a Box”
Lorene Taurerewa
Lorene Taurerewa has exhibited in private, public and museum galleries including: The Kentler International Drawing Center, New York, Schick Art Gallery, New York, McLean Projects for the Arts, Washington DC, Fountain/Armory Art Fair, New York, Miami Art Fair, Miami, USA, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, Waikato Museum, New Zealand, Pataka Museum, New Zealand, Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand and more recently with the He Xiangning Museum, Shenzhen, China.
Taurerewa is part of private and public collections, with recent acquisitions including the Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia and the James Wallace Arts Trust, New Zealand. She is the recipient of awards including Creative New Zealand Arts Council Grants and was awarded an artist in residency at the IASK Residency, The National Artists Studio: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea