Duologue - A Conversation Between 2 People

Ashton Jamieson and Sandra Howlett are artists and teachers. Both teaching at Sacred Heart College as well as pursuing their own art practice.

Everyday, they have conversations around art – both the students and their own. This translates into artworks while distinctly different, converse to each other in a contrasting yet complementary manner.

Come by to see Duologue, on in our beautiful Small Gallery from November 5, 2021.

Artist Biography - Ashton Jamieson

An art praxis that aligns with ‘The Bricoleur'
'(Her) universe of instruments is closed and the rules of (her) game are always to make do with “whatever is at hand”, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite’  (Levi-Strauss, 1962).

I am a Hawke’s Bay girl at heart, growing up in the small rural village of Takapau in CHB – where I served as a devoted Girl Guide alongside my sisters and learned of my imagination as my most valuable tool. As a teenager I was sent to an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Napier, where I was introduced to rules, routine, ritual (and chores) that have ever since surfaced within my sacred art methodologies.

After living abroad in Europe and then completing my tertiary studies in Wellington and Napier – I returned to the Art Deco Capital of New Zealand; where I now reside as an artist, teacher of Visual Arts at Sacred Heart College. I thrive on acquainting students with their own creative forces.

I am obsessed with paper, thread, pre-loved domestic objects and above all my process. Ladies with collaged armour from repurposed magazines form the paper soldiers in ‘Ashton’s Army’  - a growing collection that is the product of my femmage [2]-based methodology and regime, where strict rules converse with my innate studio happenings and scraps are saved and sorted as precious items.

Read more about Ashton on our website...

Artist Biography - Sandra Howlett

My artworks are an investigation of mixed media – a sense of the ‘ready-made’ intertwined with a painterly approach. The works sit between painting and a 3-dimensional process. I aim to explore the parameters around media use and its ability to move beyond conventional usage.

“What seems clear is that projects like these harness the power of art, including its tendency toward metaphor and verbal/visual play, its resistance to received ideas and its willingness to colonize new areas of knowledge, to persuade us to think differently about our relationship to the environment. They suggest that with a more proactive approach to environmental concerns, the posthuman era need not signal the end of human life as we know it. Instead, the Anthropocene might provide a new beginning for all the partners in the health of the planet.” (Hartney. E, 2014)

Read more about Sandra on our website...

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