Frances Hodgkins
It’s safe to say celebrated New Zealand contemporary artist Frances Hodgkins is having another big moment.
Kate Sylvester plays homage to the painter and pioneer by using some of Hodgkin’s textile prints in her autumn/ winter 2019 collection. Sylvester was given the opportunity to develop these prints by Te Papa Tongarewa which holds them in their collection.
A woman of firsts, Hodgkins was the first New Zealander to have her work hung ‘on the line’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman to teach at the prestigious Colarossi academy in Paris and she was chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. “Frances was experimental, influential and thoroughly modern,” says Sylvester.
Karen Walker has also released a very special collection – Frances Hodgkins Framed by Karen Walker in support of Auckland Art Gallery. The collection features three silk twill scarves, two silk crêpe de Chine blouses, four silk crêpe de Chine dresses and a travel case and tote, both in vegan leather. Each limited-edition piece showcases an iconic Frances Hodgkins painting from the early 1930s, finished with a signature Karen Walker border.
Mary Kisler, senior curator, International Art at Auckland Art Gallery and curator of Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys exhibition says, “Throughout her life Frances Hodgkins was extremely interested in fashion. Her letters to her family in New Zealand kept them up to date with the latest styles, and she worked in 1926 as a fabric designer in Manchester. Her most radical paintings are fashion-focused selfportraits combined with still-life in which she intertwines favourite fabrics, hats, shoes and objects.”
The exhibition, currently on show at Auckland Art Gallery until 1 September 2019, traces Hodgkins’ creative and peripatetic life from her upbringing in Dunedin to her global travels through France, Morocco and Spain to England.
This is explored in more detail in the 268-page hardback edition Frances Hodgkins European Journeys (Auckland University Press), $45, edited by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler, published to coincide with the exhibition, and Finding Frances Hodgkins by Kisler, (Massey University), $45.