Te Whare Hēra in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by guest artist in residence Kate Newby.

Kate Newby has built her career on the principle of ‘travelling light’, responding to locations where she is invited to work by translating her casual observations of things and places into sculptural installations of locally sourced materials, and testing where she can be and what she should do through architectural interventions and site works. Her modus operandi requires her to rely on local knowledge, building networks of helpers to share in her efforts, but also testing audiences’ expectations about what is proper to the art experience.

In December 2020 she flew in to New Zealand from San Antonio Texas, where she is currently based, a return journey conditioned by the COVID pandemic that is curtailing the kind of movement to which Newby has become accustomed. Coming home to make this exhibition has enabled her to reconnect with places –Te Henga on Auckland’s west coast, Paeroa, Whanganui, and Te Whanganui-a-Tara – and people: family members, old friends, artists, makers, and more.

YES TOMORROW is therefore a particularly memorable ‘touching down’. It maintains the artist’s customary lightness, as she addresses herself to the Adam Art Gallery’s building and its environs and brings in handmade objects retrieved from storage and made for the occasion. But it also grounds her, taking stock of her passage through the art world, crystallising her particular sculptural language, and memorialising those transitory encounters that litter her life. The exhibition unfolds as a set of confident and challenging interventions that recast the relationship between art and its context and invite viewers to look again at the world around them.

Te Whare Hēra wishes to acknowledge the generous support of Kate’s Residency from Nerissa Barber, David Moriss, And Richard Moss. Thanks also to our partners Wellington City Council and the College Of Creative Arts Toi Rauwhārangi