Opening night:
Friday 3rd July, 5-7pm

These works come from a series of exhibitions where Ōtautahi artist Julia Holderness explored the artist-designer Florence Weir’s time spent at Villa Margaux, a little-known artist residence near Menton in the South of France. Part fantasy art residency, part art historical research, the exhibition explores connections between travel, memory, and domestic objects through the presentation of a range of ceramics, fabrics, collages and paintings.

Villa Margaux was a site of social and creative inspiration for a number of artists during their Summer stays in the early 1930s. The house and surrounding landscape offered the quietly determined Weir an informal artist community and welcoming conditions for her burgeoning forays into ceramics and fabric design.

This research extends Holderness’ interest in the relationship between craft and art and the slippage between artmaking, lived experience and fiction. The imagery in Return to Villa Margaux considers pattern, landscape, still-life and the decorative sides of modernism. These objects imagine possible artworks created while staying at Villa Margaux, yet also trace Weir’s experiences living there: colours, walking in the landscape, friendships, artistic exchange, and influence. The ceramics and fabric designs could have been created by Weir at a later date, and based on memories and the spirit of that formative time.

Florence Weir’s fabrication is embodied by Holderness. In positioning herself as artistic fabricator, collaborator and commissioner, Holderness creates both ambiguity between herself and Weir’s work and “potentiality…opening out possible – and impossible – points of connection and exchange.” Weir, in some sense, proposes a form of time travel, and her loose insertion in the historical record enables a traversing across art movements, styles, locations and mediums. Return to Villa Margaux also affords Holderness a way to explore aesthetic histories and travel in the Mediterranean