Waiheke Art Gallery takes great pleasure in hosting a new exhibition of works by renowned Aotearoa artist Denis O’Connor, opening on 16 October.  O’Connor has been awarded numerous prestigious public commissions at home and abroad; his work is held in many public and private collections.    

SONGS OF THE GULF, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture at Toi O Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery in 1984 was the culmination of his experiments with white porcelain and a wild clay from Waiheke’s Te Matuku Bay estuary and fired in kilns at his property overlooking Putiki Bay.  On the strength of that body of work, O’Connor was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Otago University.  Subsequent to that fellowship OConnor’s art practice moved from ceramics to sculpture and his abandoned Putiki kilns became an archaeological site. Two of the three chimneys have fallen, the debitage of bricks referencing an era of fervent collective industry.

As O’Connor prepares for a thirty-year survey at the newly opened and enlarged Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui and a significant book published by Massey University Press, he has been uncovering fragments of porcelain cameos from the relics scattered around the kilns.

Slate wall pieces, inset with small shards fragments uncovered from around the kilns, will be displayed alongside a central cabinet-sculpture, GHOST CARGO, a major recent work destined for the Survey Exhibition in June 2027. This multi-media piece is saturated with diverse materiality and origin narratives. It repurposes heritage roofslates, ceramics and precious gemstone spheres and is densely autobiographical.

A group of ten small carved inkwells that share their imagery and texts with the provenance of O’Connor's residency on Waiheke since 1969 will complement the centrepiece sculpture.