Strong synergy between works

Zita Waldron has lived in South Canterbury since 1973, after moving here from Dannevirke, where she was born.

She studied art at Aoraki Polytechnic under the local painter Rosemary Campbell. Waldron also began her creative career as a painter, and later expanded her practice to sculpture.

There is a strong synergy between Waldron’s paintings and sculptural works. Both have a distinctive ethereal and feminine quality that she communicates through her brushstrokes and moulding-marks alike.

Flight from Ukraine (pictured) is a dynamic composition that juxtaposes this quality with its heavy subject matter, which looks at the current crisis in Ukraine and how it has upended everyday life for the country’s residents.

Showing four figures balanced atop of one another, they look to be overcoming the solidity of their materiality in their ‘‘flight’’. The sturdiness of the bronze seems to capture not the moral weight of war, but the solidarity that grows between people when caught in the crossfire of state violence. Furthermore, the fourth and hovering form looks to be an angelic figure protecting and elevating those taking flight.

Waldron’s work is held in many private and public gallery collections. Flight from Ukraine is on display at the gallery as part of the 2022 Alpine Energy Art Awards and Annual South Canterbury Art Society.