To watch, with your mind’s eye, the world floating quiet Becky Richards
Around roundness.
To watch, with your mind’s eye, the world floating quiet; a workshop and exhibition initiated by Auckland based artist, Becky Richards, will exist as a shared, contemplative exploration of roundness, and its intrinsic appeal.
Richards borrows from processes used to form hikaru dorodango (shining dumplings, or mudballs), a traditional Japanese earth craft. Here, she utilises the production of aggregate mudballs as a sensate method of exploring the nature of the Moeraki boulders, and other sources of organic roundness.
This project currently exists as the result of two strains of research - one tactile and physical, the other cerebral, reflective, and linguistic. As a means of growing and enriching this body of research, Becky Richards and Blue Oyster have invited interested contributors to come and spend time; engaging with making, thinking, talking and writing - around roundness - in a way that suits them. Their contributions to a series of collective activities will form the body of the exhibition.
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Becky Richards is a Christchurch born artist, based in Auckland and is currently undertaking her MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. Favouring analog, tactile processes and natural materials, Richards seeks to describe and encourage a close and curious engagement with the organic world. She is interested in how such engagement can induce energetic, cognitive and emotional changes of state in humans; focusing on rhythms of weather, seasons, botanical presence, elemental flux, interconnectivity and the liveliness of organic matter.
She looks for simple activities, ways of thinking, and states of being that can help generate balance and well-being, particularly in increasingly screen-oriented, digitally-saturated societies. Richards’ previous exhibitions include; Three Nights in the desert, C3 Contemporary Artspace, 2013 (solo); Temple of shapes, Seventh Gallery, 2013 (group); Domestos, Tinning St Gallery, 2014 (solo); The wee shocial, Christchurch Exchange, 2015 (group).
