Main Gallery
Metaphysical Heart 1994
Maker: Peter McKay
Materials: silver, copper, gold
Private collection
Six Silver Bullets (One Missing) 1997
Maker: Peter McKay
Materials: sterling silver
private collection
Feather 1987
Maker: Peter McKay
Materials: sterling silver
Private collection
Square Brooch (after John Panting 1976-1977
Maker: Peter McKay
Materials: sterling silver
Courtesy of the Artist
Metaphysical Heart: Jewellery by Peter McKay
28 July 2007 - 25 August 2007
Maker:
Peter McKay
Curator:
Damian Skinner
A storytelling jeweller, working alone on Banks Peninsula, with one eye focused on the artistic heritage of Europe and the other trained on the mythic potential of his local landscape. Welcome to the work (and world) of Peter McKay, one of this country's senior jewellers.
From his early days as an apprentice of Kobi Bosshard, trained in the techniques and aesthetics of European goldsmithing, to the appropriation of European modernism and Medieval and Renaissance art that marked the achievement of his mature style in the early 1990s, to his recent investigation of what's come to be known as Canterbury Gothic, McKay's practice can seem contradictory, different genres with nothing in common.
Taking its name from the Metaphysical Heart series, a long-running narrative in brooch form, Metaphysical Heart: Jewellery by Peter McKay is a retrospective of over three decades of jewellery, surveying the diversity and extent of McKay's work, and looking for the common threads of technique and concept that bind his work together.
Curator Dr Damian Skinner will be providing a floor talk about Metaphysical Heart at Objectspace on Saturday 28 July, 11am.
Damian Skinner is a freelance art historian and curator based in Gisborne. He has curated exhibitions for galleries in Aotearoa and internationally. His research interests include modernism, customary Mäori art and contemporary jewellery. His most recent book, titled Another Modernism: Mäoritanga and Mäori Modernist Art is being published by Auckland University Press in February 2008.