Kallis Ema: Celebrating Flowers, Fruit, And Roots

Exhibition by Astrid Nielsch at Fareham Gallery
Fareham Gallery is excited to host Kallis Ema: A celebration of flowers, fruit, and roots an exhibition of oil paintings by Astrid Nielsch opening on April 6th. Fareham Gallery has held a number of exhibitions following last years Iti Exhibition, with Sandie Fletchers “Menagerie” closing on the 2nd of April. The gallery is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 1.00pm to 5.00pm or by appointment. We invite all local artists who wish to exhibit in our space to contact us.

Astrid’s work lies somewhere between colourful Scandinavian and Eastern European folk art and French Impressionism: Astrid’s plein air paintings of her garden are as much a nod to artists like Monet as they are an expression of her whakapapa, which connects her to Estonia, Finland and Ukraine as well as Northern Germany. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Astrid’s mother Maria Felicitas.
“I don’t know if anyone ever taught me how to paint as a child, but my first medium was finger paint and my mother faithfully kept all my masterworks from age two”, says Astrid Nielsch. “I do remember one time when I was painting a forest, and my mother insisted that I should add ‘ferns and mosses’ to the forest floor. City kid that I was, I did not know what those were, and she scribbled them in for me. She was a great lover of plants and nature and taught us the names of the trees, herbs, flowers, bugs and butterflies we encountered in city parks and on our holidays. We never had a garden, but we had house plants, and I learned how to take cuttings at an early age. One year we planted spring bulbs at school, and it was the greatest thing”. Gardening ran in the family: her grandparents left behind a little wooden house and an orchard in Estonia when they were ‘voluntarily’ resettled during WWII and later became refugees.

Growing up believing she was 100% German, Astrid later found out there were good reasons why she always had trouble fitting in. After a successful international career as a musician and academic, she eventually followed in the footsteps of her other Baltic relatives, who had left Germany after the war: here in Featherston, she has found her own little wooden house and has been busy planting a new orchard these last eleven years.
The exhibition opening will be on Thursday, 6 April, at 4pm. A musical celebration on Easter Sunday 9 April at 3.00pm will feature music for the medieval harp. Astrid is raising funds to put strings back on her two larger harps and we will appreciate a koha to support her.