News From Nowhere: Lisa Walker & Brendan Huntley

MPRG Exhibition
Curated by Dunja Rmandić
22 June – 18 August 2024

Irreverent but kind, the works of Lisa Walker and Brendan Huntley take themselves as seriously as we should take ourselves. They share a makeshift, DIY aesthetic that allows for a gentle approach and both deliberately tread the line between craft and fine art.

Walker’s oversized, ‘easy’ but haphazard jewellery and Huntley’s objects, paintings and works on paper that depict faces with an emotive affect, present us with choices, perspectives and open sentences. They may be about our relationship with people, about our relationship with objects, our relationship with ourselves or about nothing at all.

They give us space and time to think, feel, be uncomfortable, be emotional, find joy and laugh and wonder why we like art in the first place and why anyone makes anything at all. This exhibition draws on the deep relationship that both artists have to craft, the body and, most importantly, to the way both address the human need to make, and see, art.

Lisa Walker is an internationally renowned jeweller based in New Zealand and Brendan Huntley is a painter and sculptor, and singer in garage-rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring.

 

 

Lisa Walker SMALL MACHINES, SMALL MACHINES, WORK HARD NECKLACE 2013, Lisa Walker and Chicks On Speed (Alexandra Murray-Leslie, Melissa E. Logan), Five-colour screen print, stuffing, Photo courtesy of The National, Brendan Huntley, Untitled (Natural) 2023 white raku, stoneware, glaze, slip, enamel, on steel armature base plate 88 x 40 x 40 cm Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Lisa Walker Brooch 2008, wool, silver, lacquer, glue, Courtesy of the artist