Elspeth Fougere, Elise O'Neil and Aroha Novak

The Blue Oyster is pleased to present Elise O'Neill and Aroha Novak | Expensive Rubbish and Elspeth Fougere | Here, There and Everywhere (We are a Community of Cells). Using handmade and recycling methods O'Neill, Novak and Fougere are part of an international resurgence of a craft and do-it-yourself ethos, which has grown in response to current economic and environmental conditions. The exhibitions will open on Tuesday 1 December at 5:30pm and run until 24 December.

For Expensive Rubbish Elise O'Neill and Aroha Novak present handmade military and consumer items which have been constructed from recycled materials; they take issue with these products which feed off capitalist narratives of fear and desire. Underlying their work is a critique of consumer fetishism and media sensation which negates, obscures and denies the socially and environmentally destructive forces at play behind these systems. O'Neill's oversized home appliances, handmade from recycled cardboard and newspaper, invert the throw-away mentality of consumer culture and Novak's child-size military vehicles allude to the way war is fantasised, flattened and re-packaged through media depictions.

Elspeth Fougere's Here, There and Everywhere (We are a Community of Cells) begins with a mass of woollen crochet spirals, a caricature collection of cells. These handmade forms are taken out into the landscape, placed onto bodies and into environments in playful, spontaneous, storytelling activations. The encounters are photographically documented as drawings of events, forming trace histories of relationships between the body and other forms and act as a basis for ongoing interactions during the exhibition.

Every Saturday from 12 - 3 Fougere and collaborators will run free open workshop craft sessions inviting participants to help her grow and exchange the colony of woollen cells, or to use the space as a place to mingle and work together with other local crafters. Through freely sharing wool craft know-how, make-your-own-pieces, and all the stories and laughter that go along with learning to crochet, the cells will spread out from the gallery installation and into Dunedin. Her strategy of gathering people together for the exchange of objects, skills, resources and stories in the gallery space, captures core philosophy of the contemporary craft resurgence.

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