These exhibitors, since emerging from their respective New Zealand tertiary arts programmes during the last half decade, have between them exhibited nationally and internationally, entering and winning awards and demonstrating capabilities as makers of artistically attuned craft. Objectspace has observed the opportunities and difficulties makers can encounter in establishing practices. With this in mind, In from the Garden is intended to look closer at four makers from around New Zealand who, currently at this period of their respective careers, are staying the course and readying to settle in for the long haul.
In 1897, the American historian Alice Morse Earle wrote, "half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal." Similar to gardening, art, including craft is a barometer of the times and, as Alice Morse Earle observed, notable practice always looks to the future. Helping to redefine the parameters of contemporary craft and fine art practice, the makers featuring in In from the Garden demonstrate that they are "striving about the future".