Archive News
7 x 10 - 19 Oct 2009
Seventy stacks of shaped blankets cover the Vault’s floor at Tauranga Art Gallery. Japanese-born artist, Akiko Diegel, brings to Tauranga an evocative installation that visually, and socio-economically, has the capacity to affect her audience.
Each unit comprises a different number of shaped blankets giving the impression of a city, or neat piles of folded laundry. Uniform in shape, each blanket has been reconfigured into what appears to be a plastic supermarket shopping bag shape. But for those who remember the pre-duvet days of blankets, labels such as Chateau, Tasman, Coronet and Princess from well-known woollen mills will delight and conjure up memories of New Zealand’s golden era of wool manufacturing. The exhibition title, 7x10, makes reference not only to the floor arrangement but the mathematical precision of commercial weaving.
Blankets are enticing for their warmth and colour but also have a long history in New Zealand. Used as items of trade with Maori by the first Europeans, blankets were the carriers of disease and dampness. Blankets were woven in mills throughout New Zealand and proudly exported. But their heyday is over. Diegel gives her prized blankets a new lease of life; the idea of a supermarket bag being mass-produced is poles apart from the recycling of individual blankets.
Diegel’s installation is visually insightful, elucidating many aspects about New Zealand’s history and contemporary ideas about recycling and consumerism.
Diegel is an Auckland-based artist who completed her studies at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts.
7x10 can be viewed at Tauranga Art Gallery until Sunday 6 December.
© 2009