2023 Scholarship
This Scholarship Sculpture submission focuses on the candidate’s family and cultural history related to Chinese market gardening. They see their practice enquiry as an expression of their love for their grandparents and an honouring of their combined work-life and labour.
Objects and sculptural works all connect to the vegetables grown (home/market gardens) and the shop run by their Por Por (grandmother) and Gong Gong (grandfather). The candidate notes they are creating works through an imagined conception of the family fruit shop (diorama), and through stories told and photos of their grandparents at work. There is a tenderness in the rendering of these artworks that occurred in the making processes from the outset. Specific detailing that characterises the person, object, or site is technically well-executed; the scale model of the house interior diagrammatically positions the family’s social hub, and site-specific installations are made in Gong Gong’s domestic garden.
Processes employed conceptually link to family stories and Chinese market garden histories in Gisborne, where the family lived and worked. This includes the Chinese characters hand-painted onto the gardening tools representing the symbol for money (cin/yen), or Por Por and Gong Gong’s words/storytelling. This kind of embodiment of cultural linking is sophisticated. (Note: including captions on the folio to contextualise some of this information would be helpful.) Likewise, materials are treated in such a way as to connect labour and products (the hand-built papier mâché vegetables) with fortune and wealth (reflective gold acrylic perspex is used to link to histories of gold mining and the gambling game mah-jongg).
In-depth research about Chinese market gardening and immigration informs the work in productive ways alongside the stories garnered from family members. Time is spent in the workbook sharing the candidate’s family tree and ‘all of its relations’ between China and Aotearoa, market gardening and the family business, culminating in the final in-situ, family-tree installation. Having these interconnectivities revealed in this manner provides an enriched backdrop to the significance of the sculptural works and effectively maps the ‘why?’ of the project.
Time and care in the making meant the candidate could ‘tend’ to the work similarly to how their Gong Gong worked his garden. The folio artworks operate through sculptural modes of description using conventions of representation, scale, form, surface and colour. The sculpted vegetables remain faithful to both their Gong Gong's garden and real vegetables, i.e. a carrot is a carrot. Artist references make sense and provide the impetus for decisions made. Experimental phases are also well-documented in the workbook to support conceptual and directional shifts. For example, the idea to incorporate native leaves that might be found on the ground to signal the Aotearoa context; crate baskets used in China; and the gold bars. It was insightful to access this kind of thinking and decision-making process via the workbook; each of these propositions/objects had the potential to conceptualise and contextualise ideas in exciting and relevant ways.
Download 2023's Scholarship Sculpture exemplar [PDF, 5.5 MB]
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2022 Scholarship
This Scholarship submission explores being a queer person and a child of first-generation immigrants. The focus is on their "experience of identifying as LGBTQIA+ whilst being raised in a Chinese household outside of China in New Zealand," described as the 'presence' of one's identity and the push-pull of different factors jostling for prominence.
The candidate states that the work was "formed by my desire for an outlet to explore and work out my own experiences and emotions." The theme is hefty and is examined through personal reflections translatable through sculptural and performative means.
In their workbook, the candidate analyses the importance of sculpture to their thinking. They understand sculpture to be unconventional or ‘lesser than’ painting in the eyes of their parents; therefore, a medium that can hold the emotional weight of the subject matter and be a "literal embodiment of failing to meet" parental expectations, potentially breaking ethical values such as "honesty, obedience, righteousness, harmony, etc."
The accompanying workbook provides insightful and intelligent oversight of the background context and research, effectively supporting the portfolio work.
The integration of methods and approaches from other artists referenced is done with sophistication. The candidate speaks of how each practice has influenced the sculptural thinking within their work, analysing how particular processes speak to their ideas. For example, the use of braille in terms of visibility and invisibility and access (Fontcuberta), and the taping of broken plates as an act of restoration (de Vries).
Symbolism is another critical strategy achieved through the incorporation of Chinese characters, and traditional, patterned material objects, fortune cookies, etc. Language is used to refer to values broken, like the newsprint banner work where the covering of the figure within the school setting is a potent comment on the place the candidate felt most comfortable expressing themselves.
The level of analysis of media, material and process to concept and context is excellent. The candidate understands how sculpture can provoke meaning conceptually through multiplicity and mass. The fortune cookies associate in this way; they refer to "an assimilation into Western culture" and "uncertainty in identity." Materially, they enact the notion of the copy, iterative process, and repetition.
The performance of walking on the cookies articulates sculptural and personal vulnerabilities, and the symbolic consequences of failure to conform. Ideas of masculinity and femininity, material symbolism, and gender are explored in Hanfu ('Straitjacket'). Made at body scale from newsprint with screen-printed patterns, the work portrays the disjuncture between the queer community they are part of and their Chinese upbringing.
The garment is well-made and, like the other works, approximates through its materiality the conflict felt. Over and over, actions that belong to sculpture are used to analyse ideas through the making processes and symbols employed.
The candidate has pursued a personally-challenging, social, ethical, political topic to create an extraordinary sculptural investigation that developed in parallel with their shifting desires, attitudes, and discoveries.
Download 2022 Scholarship Sculpture workbook pages [PDF, 21 MB]
2020 Scholarship
This scholarship submission presents a politically motivated analysis about perception and objectification of women in society from a personal perspective, considerate of the social, ethical, and cultural contexts that the candidate encounters.
Observations made, drawing on their experiences at home, school, and in social situations form the basis for research on gender norms, expectations, roles and histories of ‘the housewife’, wife, and stay-at-home mums. Of influence also were family and friends' stories of being sexualised (inappropriate cat-calling, etc.).
Gender stereotyping is developed as a device and pseudo methodology through a set of performative acts that are unapologetic. Artistic reference is well-pitched in support of the candidate's desire to make a clear statement, not hold back, and position their viewpoints directly in front of the audience. They want to make their audience think and to respond with different emotions – and, hopefully, insight.
A playfulness and prompting occur in the way the sculptures are made, cut out, placed, projected, or arranged. For example, playing cards are utilised in multiple ways, always recognisable but re-shaped, re-formed into vaginas, flowers, and houses.
Objects are used to speak to functionality and gender. A set of themed material objects – such as fruit, vegetables, bread (aka breadwinner), utensils, cars, Barbies, nipples, and houses – are employed to make particular statements. Sculptures arrive in unexpected forms and combinations of motifs, such as the flesh furniture, the nipple house, and wine goblets with stems and bases made from Barbie body parts.
In the workbook, the candidate outlines their thinking, how they have interpreted and placed bodies (female and male) in positions and roles that affect the natural order and suggest discomfort, manipulation, and vulnerability to communicate messages of what it feels like to be sexualised – and to make a claim for power.
This project is highly experimental and confident; it owns its aesthetic and is bold in its delivery of these sculptural statements. The making is provisional, and the sculptural objects and arrangements approximate relationships with contemporary society, culture, and other artists' practice that is pivotal to the way the discussion unfolds.
This includes making reference to Judy Chicago's Dinner Party alongside Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man through the use of Barbie dolls, patterned plates, and an improvised dinner table, aka banquet, in front of a domestic home. The same performers are used throughout the portfolio work; they are age-appropriate in that they appear to be role-playing the future, and are themselves positioned as objects at times.
The ‘tables are turned’ for the final piece, and the male performer returns to centre stage. The candidate makes the deliberate decision not to create a happy ending that she feels doesn’t exist. However, the plates – in true Chicago-style – refer to the female body, idealisation, and beauty. Again, these are purposeful objects, roughly arranged to provoke attention; to ask the viewer to look closer.
Download 2020 Scholarship Sculpture workbook pages [PDF, 29 MB]