Jane Zusters

EXHIBITIONS and BOOK COMING UP

Where the home is, is a richly beautiful, sturdily put together project; a precious and unusual memento of one of the most extraordinary events in New Zealand’s recent history.

Andrew Paul Woods

I have just finished doing the prints for my exhibitions coming up at the Forrester Gallery, Oamaru and The Aigantigne Gallery, Timaru. Where the home is : the Christchurch Earthquakes 2010-2012 showing at the Forrester Gallery, 9 Thames Street, Oamaru 13 April till 15 July in a joint exhibition with artist David Wooding’ of earthquake paintings called Out of Order. On Saturday 28th April at 4.30 there will be a floor talk with Jane and David along with Christchurch artist Ross Gray whose exhibition Span is on at the same time.

On Monday 14 at 5.30pm Where the home is will be opening at PaperGraphica, 192 Bealey Avenue,Christchurch along with Fire at home by Eion Stevens and Dining in by Kelvin Mann

Quakers billed as a pop-up photographic exhibition about the Christchurch earthquake will be on at the Aigantigne Gallery at Wai-iti Road, Timaru, 5 – 20 May 2012.

Where the home is; the Christchurch Earthquakes 2010 –2012

Those of us who live in Christchurch take home the sights and sounds of our post quake day-to-day lives. I first got the idea of putting homes with quakes by seeing the intimate details of a bathroom revealed when walls were shaken down. My art practice is often a response to the events of my life. On February 22, 2011, I was in Manchester St, when I was flung to the ground as all around me the buildings collapsed. If I had been standing where I was a minute before, I would have been showered with glass and rubble. I picked myself up and I took photographs as I joined the evacuation. My painting studio in Lichfield St, which I had left 10 minutes earlier, was badly damaged and has since been demolished. Over the last year I have taken thousands of earthquake photographs which I am montaging into the living rooms of my friends and family as a way of expressing “the new normal’ here in Christchurch. It is a juxtaposition of normal life and tragedy. My images originate in a reality that I have been experiencing along with all of us who continue to live in Christchurch. All of us have a story and this is my experience of these times.

I am rapt that with the help of Mike Coker and Johnston Press I have produced yet another limited edition, high quality, digitally printed artist’s book. There are 76 pages with a hand printed, signed, archival cover in a numbered edition of 45 priced just to recover costs and get the work out there. Have a look at my shop to see how to get your copy.

Kia ora
Just letting you know on tuesday I got my filbert brushes back. I went to help Rua Pick who had got a call as a result of registering for the Hamish Keith Lost Art Site and so we were assigned engineers and Civil Defence staff who were awesome. They got carried away helping us as you can see from this photo. This was not part of their work brief. We had been told not to expect them to carry stuff for us in our initial briefing where they told us we would go to gaol if we left the group and went sightseeing. When we got there the entrance to my studio at 84 Lichfield St was red stickered and a complete no go area which means no one is allowed in.

The whole of the top floor was sitting on our floor . Until the engineers had inspected we did not know the roof had not caved into my part of the building. Initially they said it was too dangerous to go into 82 Lichfield St, the entrance Rua’s studio. I burst into tears when they told us this and got a big hug from the guy you can see in the photo with the red hat and the canvas roll. Then they changed their minds and gave us 10 minutes. I got in through the back door so to speak through a hole in the wall. I was told by Civil Defence if I was too frightened not to go in but this never crossed my mind.
I was assigned two engineers and allowed to go in through the 82 Lichfield Entrance and enter my studio through Rua’s studio where part of the wall had fallen down. With help you can get out a lot of stuff in 10 minutes. My area of the studio was very badly water logged so I was really pleased to get my brushes, staple gun, canvas pliers, Peter Langland’s photos, Ben Woolcombe’s prints,heaps of Karen Giles sketch books and paintings and one sodden,crumpled canvas of mine as a souvenir.
We are so, so, so grateful we were able to retrieve any work – a miracle actually!

I loved my studio at 84 Lichfield St. I was lucky enough to score it in 2008 when my friend Tiffany Thornley told me Anne-Marie Jean was leaving. It was like my old studio in Ponsonby from many years ago but at a Christchurch price I could afford. The High Street Project was next door on the same floor. I shared about 2000 square feet with Norbert who was retiring from being a display artist and Karen Giles, a passionate painter of water and islands. It took me 35 minutes to walk there from my home in Linwood and the bus terminal was opposite if I bused. After 12am on Saturday the parking was free so I used to take my car in with materials. In this composite photograph you can see the work Crown I did for the Academy of Fine Arts Artists as Activists exhibition last year. I liked being able to work on the floor and walls at the same time and I loved the scale of the work I was able to do here. Painting big really is exciting. When I was painting at home I could only do one picture at a time and the paint took forever to dry so I loved the expansion of my process possible in this space.

After the 20th September Earthquake our building was red- stickered and we were out of it for some months as the glass in the skylights fell into the stairs. Karen and i were so happy to be back. I had just done a complete tidy up and buy up of materials and started on my next projects. I am really sad about loosing my brushes as I had some fantastic Spanish filberts I bought in London eleven years ago for about 5 pounds each and these are utterly irreplaceable as is my special kit of etching burins for scrafitto. The paint just flowed out of my filbert brushes and they just got better and better with age. Gradually Norbert was disposing of 10 years of prop making and Karen and I were expanding and we had just made half the studio into an exhibition space. Norbert helped us make walls and we were very pleased with ourselves and our mates were lining up to do things in this venue. The Sunday before the quake we had our Artists for save our water Hurunui Water Matters exhibition open there. We had orginally been going to have it at the Linwood Community Centre / Te Whare Roimata but this had been closed because of the September earthquake. It was empowering having our own exhibition space.

Alby McCathy, Sally Hope, Ben Woolcombe, Karen Gillies, Peter Langlands, Elsie Ellison, Edward Snowdon and I lost the work we were exhibiting which was meant to open at Crossroads Gallery Cheviot on the 16th March. We were exhibiting artwork about the Hurunui River and Lake Sumner area as we do not want Lake Sumner to look like Lake Monowai, raised 2.4 metres in 1920 and still ringed with dead trees. The Hurunui farmers’ water wish-list, proposing more intensive irrigation, could mean the destruction of natural environments that we love and want to remain as they are. Once you dam a wild river it is destroyed forever.

As the third floor fell into our floor Leslie Shands and Dolly Hope who was looking after the water show, escaped down the stairs which now had perspex in the overhead skylights so they were not showered with glass, and clambered over the rubble of the third floor on the footpath. The building inspector who had inspected our space after the first earthquake, said he would not mind being in this building if there was a quake. Unlike some of the modern buildings the stairs held evan though the roof fell in. A few days later Leslie told me of their escape and warned me we would not get our stuff back unlike the first quake. Eion Stevens whose studio was on the third floor lost over 50 paintings. Karen lost ten years of painting. I lost all my painting stuff and some paintings but I was lucky most of my art was at my place. I had left the building five minutes before and was flung to the the ground as the buildings around me in Manchester St collapsed.

At the memorial service they played a 14 minute video of the inner city and when 84 Lichfield St appeared I exclaimed that’s my studio. Later I tracked it down on U tube and captured a blurry still. When Prince William said out of ” love comes grief ‘I acknowledged my grief for the city and studio I loved and are no more.

Caryline Boreham, Kevin Capon, Paul Hartigan and Jane Zusters – Found: Documenting person, place and object in contemporary photography
01 Mar to 13 Mar 2011
Sanderson Gallery
251 Parnell Road
Auckland 1052
(09) 374 4476
opening march first

the price of love

the price of love

We have been so lucky that the quake happened in the middle of the night and so no one was killed downtown. Today I put up this selection of photographs I took during the course of my normal activities and in my neighbourhood starting with the local dairy on the day of the quake. The building had the side collapse and they were still open and milk was being delivered. Gradually over the week all the other business were shut down in this block and when I wander past I just kept snapping. I have been very,very lucky as I live in an old timber house that just shakes around like a tree blowing in the wind. My hot water cylinder is leaking and the floors have moved but my house is fine.