A new exhibition recently opened at Artspace Aotearoa on Tāmaki Makaurau’s Karangahape Road, celebrating the creativity of visual artist Maree Horner and writer J.C. Sturm. The NZMS team were tasked with digitising and printing two journals by Sturm for display in the exhibition.
The exhibition (Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm) focuses on work specifically located within the domestic realm, revealing ideas relating to daily life and routines, including the many different roles people perform within the home. It spans a range of artistic mediums such as sculpture, printmaking, writing, and ephemera.
“In the past two years we’ve all experienced an acute sharpening of the complexity that is contained within the sphere of ‘home’: it is as much political as it is psychological, creative as it is practical, philosophical as it is emotional. Both Horner and Sturm take up the challenge that it is to harness the many elements that play a role in the processing of and making a life whole through practice. Honing in on the edges of much of this life, their work explores the rituals, forms, and languages we return to in order to craft our worlds and asks could this be otherwise?”
– Artspace Aotearoa, 2023.
We previously mentioned Sturm in a 2021 blog post describing the digitisation of Auckland City Libraries’ Chelsea Sugar Refinery employee cards. In the post, we highlighted some of Sturm’s achievements, including being one of the first Māori women to gain a university degree, receiving a Bachelor of Arts from The University of Canterbury and a Master of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington.
The opportunity to digitise the journals for Artspace’s exhibition connected our team to Sturm once again, offering fascinating insights into her commitment to creative practice within the context of her everyday life. The journals outline Sturm’s trip from Aotearoa New Zealand to India in 1958-1959. They feature descriptions of her time spent onboard a boat during the voyage to India and back, as well as the four months she spent living there with her two children. Sturm makes interesting observations about her daily life as a mother while travelling, but also as a writer seeking out moments to work. The journals expose the fine balance between what it takes to run a family and finding a way to continue an artistic practice.
“There is much that remains unsaid in the journals, but there are also moments of exquisite craftsmanship which can be read as a precursor to many of Sturm’s more autobiographical poems.”
– Ruth Buchanan, Kaitohu Director, Artspace Aotearoa
Maintaining an outlet for creativity while navigating the domestic activities and responsibilities of daily life is an important theme within Artspace’s exhibition. It’s sure to invite some deeper contemplation as we consider our own attempts to juggle competing responsibilities in our hectic lives.
Make sure you take the time to visit the exhibition which runs until 6th April 2023.
You can also read more about J.C. Sturm and Artspace’s exhibition in The Reading Revolution’s blog.