Opening night:
Friday 4th July, 5pm – 7pm
Jay Hutchinson is a New Zealand artist based in Dunedin. Originally a street artist, Hutchinson traded his cans of spray paint for needle and thread. In his Masters in Fine Arts project titled ‘Concrete to Textile’ which exhibited at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2006, Hutchinson recreated a series of graffitied walls as elaborate hand-embroidered panels. After spending hundreds of hours on the project Hutchinson developed a passion for the craft and has since produced several projects a year using the labour intensive process.
This current exhibition “Eight Steps to Perfection and Tales from Outside the Dairy” Hutchinson employs a pyschogeography model where he explores footpaths and carparks outside of dairys, two fours and fish and chip shops. Hutchinson photographs and collects found structures and discarded objects (trash) that he then recreates as elaborate hand-embroidered sculptures.
“Hutchinson’s work takes the throwaway, literally, and raises it to a level where it is no longer worthless. Using as his subject discarded scraps and rubbish found on his daily journeys, he reclaims the items by recreating them and reinventing them as intricate and attractive embroidered pieces. This allows us to appreciate that even the detritus of everyday life can have its own surprising and subversive beauty.
Many of Hutchinson’s pieces are hand-embroidered in polyester machine thread on cotton drill cloth. Other, more massive, installations include urban materials such as tarmac slabs, steel and concrete. Hutchinson’s works subvert the norm, not by simply making high art from low art, but by making high art from scrap. While this makes us reappraise the everyday, it also posits the thought that rubbish, in all its accumulated glory, will become the epitaph of this civilisation, a Rosetta Stone or Bayeux Tapestry from which our history will be deciphered.”
James Dignan, Otago Daily Times, March 3, 2022
Hutchinson has shown throughout New Zealand, Australia and China. Hutchinson’s work is held in a number of private and public collections including The Dowse Art Museum, The Suter Art Gallery, The Otago Museum, The Hocken Library, The and the Aigantighe Gallery.
