I felt like some watcher, divining skies
Jamie Chapman and Hayley Theyers
Jamie Chapman presents a series of atmospheric cloud paintings while Hayley Theyers exhibits a collection of Surrealist photographs.
Jamie Chapman
Cloud watching, a passive activity; an enjoyable moment of pareidolia. What divinations do we make from the skies today? A face, a strange creature, entertainment, a twitter story, a news story, fluctuations in the market, investments lost and made, shifting borders, international and internal conflicts, a home lost; inside family and friends. Colourful pigments, seductive paint work, a few marks made by hand, the history of a movement.
A moment in time.
Jamie Chapman was born in the United Kingdom. His family immigrated to New Zealand and settled in Whangārei when he was 2 years old.
Chapman studied his first year of a Fine Arts degree at Whitecliffe College, Auckland before travelling to Europe. He returned to Auckland to pursue and complete his Master’s degree at Elam, School of Fine Arts in 2012.
In 2012 Chapman was the recipient of the Joe Raynes Scholarship from the University of Auckland and in 2013 was the winner of the National Youth Art Award.
Since completing his MFA Chapman has exhibited work in New Zealand galleries such as Foenander, Boyd Dunlop, The Vivian, Artshouse and in Edinburgh at Scott Lawrie Gallery. He has also been involved in several group exhibitions at Hangar Gallery.
Hayley Theyers
Divining the skies; Aquarius pours the life-giving waters, the seer tips ink in the bowl to look in its clouds for a higher reality. Her soul climbs ever higher against this sky, and at ecstatic moments is transfixed by it, pure truth divined.
Meanwhile, water turns to ice, and the space under one is very much smaller than the space around.
Hayley Theyers is a lens-based artist resident in Huia, in the Waitakere Ranges. Her art draws from the collective unconscious familiar to us from dreams. Knowing life in the shadows, she has learned to bring in light, which illuminates the unseen, sometimes creating new and deeper shadows. Her shows include I too have been to Arcadia (2016) and In the Dark we are without her Empress Light (2019), both at Black Asterisk gallery, of which PhotoForum’s Nina Seja praised her work’s “ability to suggest a larger story beyond the frame”, The Art of Death (2019), Communicating Vessels (2021, also a book), Still Life/Wild Places at Katherine Mansfield House (2021), and the sell-out solo show, Suite of Tales (2023) at Pea Sea Art.
Theyers, who also directs music videos, and is known for her portraits for Phantom Billstickers’ Musicians of Aotearoa poster series, displayed around the country during New Zealand Music Month 2017-19.
