Christine Hellyar
[3]: 54–55 Over the years consistent themes in Hellyar's work have included 'her celebration of the environment, her interest in people's interaction with nature, the validation of the domestic and a questioning of traditional gender roles'.
[1] Hellyar was drawn to the properties of the medium, which allowed for precise replication of texture and details, and used latex to cast objects such as leaves and pine cones.
[3]: 54 Country Clothesline (1972), now in the collection of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, was one of Hellyar's first major works: It consists of 22 items of clothing dipped in latex and strung along a rope propped up by a pole.
[5] An early exhibition titled Bush Situation (1976) created an environment to surround the viewer with floor pieces and hanging latex casts of vegetation, often stitched together with copper wire.
[4]: 161 Writer Warwick Brown describes a 'memorable 1979 exhibition' where Hellyar showed '70 small, soft sculptures made of stitched, unbleached calico enclosing various natural materials.
[3]: 55 [4]: 163 Art historian Anne Kirker notes that by the time of her 1985 Aprons exhibition in Wellington, Hellyar was seen as 'one of the country's most thought-provoking and innovative sculptors'.
[8] Priscilla Pitts in her 1998 survey of recent New Zealand sculpture notes that a tension between large ideas and subtle manifestations is key to Hellyar's work.
Describing a 1986 installation work Being Born, Bearing Fruit and Dying, made up of plant and sea life forms moulded from fine white clay or cast in latex, bronze, lead or iron, Pitts writes: These forms are grouped to lead the viewer through a schematised narrative not only of the human (and all of nature's) cycle of birth, reproduction and death, but also of the evolution of life, on earth, from the water to the land and finally to the air.
[1] Among these artworks was Armlet (1993), an outdoor sculpture commissioned for the University of Auckland which features nīkau palm fronds, harakeke, toetoe and silver fern cuttings cast in bronze.
Exploring histories of gender, Hellyar notes that Mrs Cook’s mother was an entrepreneur with a warehouse that provided much of the women’s clothing used for trade in the Pacific.
