Abridged speech delivered by Sue Gardiner at the opening of Stop Making Sense: Surrealist Legacies, at the Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, 2024.
28 February 2025
Abridged speech delivered by Sue Gardiner on 20 October 2024, at the opening of Stop Making Sense: Surrealist Legacies, at the Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, 2024. The exhibition was a chance to discover the enduring influence of Surrealism in contemporary art through 15 works from The Chartwell Collection, showcased alongside other striking examples. In Chartwell’s 50th Anniversary year, this exhibition explored the bizarre, dreamlike, and unexpected in art, challenging perceptions of reality.
https://thesuter.org.nz/exhibitions
Tēnā koutou katoa e te whānau toi.
Good evening everyone, it is good to be here with you all.
I am the chair of the Chartwell Charitable Trust and co-Director of the Chartwell Collection. My sister and fellow trustee Karen and I are here, along with Chartwell Anniversary Project Manager Megan Shaw, to celebrate the opening of this exhibition Stop Making Sense as part of Chartwell’s 50th Anniversary programme. We are thrilled the Suter has become part of the Anniversary calendar of events spanning from March 2024 to March 2025, that has seen exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington hosted by Te Papa Tongarewa, the Physics Room in Christchurch, Te Atamira in Queenstown, Te Uru Contemporary Art Gallery in Titirangi Auckland, and Waikato Museum in Kirikiriroa Hamilton, the Collection’s first public art gallery home. The Anniversary culminates in the launch of Being, Seeing, Making, Thinking: 50 years of the Chartwell Project, on April 4th 2025, at the home of the collection since 1997 – the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Books will be available via the Chartwell 50 page on the Chartwell website and at good bookstores.
I want to just take us back briefly to March 1974 when the first Chartwell Collection acquisitions were made. Chartwell was established by Rob Gardiner as a public loan collection in Hamilton. It later relocated to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 1997 where it is cared for by a dedicated group of visual art specialists. Back in the 1970s though and setting up an independent charitable trust, Rob required a name independent of the family, so Chartwell, being the name of the Hamilton suburb we lived in at the time, became the new Trust’s name. As Rob and others were advocating for and supporting the development of a purpose built public art gallery for the Waikato, Chartwell was established with the belief that we as members of a community, a city, and a country, would all benefit from a deeper understanding of the visual arts.
So it is always exciting to see Chartwell Collection works now actively working hard for contemporary art and reaching out to new audiences for 50 years. Thinking of the Collection as a whole entity, as a gymnasium for the creative mind, over time it has become an accumulation of creative acts. From a broad reaching invitation to think and feel with the senses, to the embodiment of the deepest levels of visual engagement, the Collection trusts artists to lead the way in embracing new things, in testing accepted boundaries, and being alert to the world that is changing around us.
On a holistic level, the Collection enables us to encounter multiple perspectives, try to see through other’s eyes and take into account of the role the artworks may deliver to future eyes. Creative visual thinking has been at the heart of Chartwell’s identity since its beginnings in 1974 and the notion of a collection as an active space of being, seeing, making and thinking has woven its way through Chartwell’s experiences over the past 50 years. with a focus on the artists, we celebrate 50 years of creative investment in the continuing process of imaginative exploration and the generation of new forms of thought.
Working still as we do with Rob, we talk a lot about the senses and the nature of the creative human being, indeed about the very rhythm of thought, to use a phrase from Surrealist founder André Breton.
Now, Stop Making Sense at the Suter Art Gallery provides us with an opportunity to link some fundamental ideas from surrealism, in itself a movement that sought to facilitate new understandings of reality that went beyond rational logic and entrenched ways of knowing. For Chartwell, there has been a deep investigation into different modes of visual thinking, from the analytical to the intuitive, the imaginative, the playful and joyful.
As we support aesthetic thinkers, we value the interaction of intention, intuition and intellect. It inspires the making by the artist and insights by the viewer.
Breton is quoted as saying in 1924: "The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights".
We all know we have evolved as human beings to imagine and to think and we know we experience art through our sensing, emotional, imagining bodies and conscious, reasoning minds. Many of the Chartwell works in the exhibition reveal these multiple sense connections.
Julian Hooper’s work, Lovesick, 2019, acrylic on canvas, is a great example, as his work implies a melting of awareness into a state of floating disorientation – the sense of undoing of defined form. Perhaps this is what a state of love sickness does - If we feel the feelings associated with being lovesick, what do we feel? A sort of collapse of familiar routines, a sense of uncertainty and loss of reality? A melting of logic and expectations, a sense of poetic expression flowing out of all that we are… ?
With Chartwell we value the sense of a wandering mind, which can take you into the realm of the unexpected, the discordant and the disruptive in the systems of our world, from language to visual understandings. Works such as Jessica Stockholder’s 2013 multi-media sculpture, A-H, involves the near collapse of discordant systems in art that refuse to be seen from just one vantage point or be just one thing – a sculpture or a painting, language or form- instead it has the attitude of being language, sculpture and painting at the same time.
In Jae Hoon Lee’s digital photograph, Residue, 2007, an image of a teetering rubbish mountain contains a sense of impending collapse and chaos- not only of the top heavy stack of rubbish, but also of the systems of consumption that create the sheer quantity of debris. We experience the unpredictability of that system.
David Hatcher’s silkscreen on plexiglass, The simplest surrealist act (André Breton), disrupts expected habitual actions such as the deeply ingrained learned pattern of language – our brains have to work harder to try to read his work – they even give up surprisingly quickly- this allows other perceptive responses to emerge, being led by our sense based feelings. Yvonne Todd’s 2005 inkjet print, Wet Sock, evokes the olfactory senses that we imagine when we see the image. The body has other roles to lay in this exhibition- from Mary McIntyre to Patricia Piccinini.
Play as learning is ingrained in us since childhood but is often unlearned in adulthood. Michael Parekowhai’s sculpture from 1992, They Comfort Me, references a giant game of pick up sticks- the unlearning made through randomness, chance and risk.
Reflecting on the 50 years, it is clear that one of the most important endeavours that we must all continue to stand up for is the enabling of ongoing investigations into what it means to value culture and creative visual thinking for everyone. It is important we recognise that all public art collections in Aotearoa New Zealand may be regarded collectively as a resource important to the wider New Zealand culture. They must be collectively cared for and experienced too.
Projects like Chartwell can shine only because of the great artists whose work we value highly. Yes, André Breton, there is still a need to reclaim the value of the imagination, and its value to our world. It is more than just ‘nice to have’ as politicians have said in 2024, for without it, our human beingness will quite simply stop making sense.
So with this exhibition, Stop Making Sense, we hope that you as viewers will ‘start to make sense’ of your own imagined world through the visual arts.
Ngā mihi nui. Thank you.
