Trish Clark Gallery is pleased to announce Vincent Ward’s second solo exhibition of new work, selected to feature in the CORE programme of The Auckland Festival of Photography 2019. LOOM is a new body of moving image works by pre-eminent New Zealand award-winning filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward. Internationally recognised for his ability to convey charged emotional experiences through his experimental approach to film making, Vincent Ward engages in a visceral visual language to explore, across four new films, ideas of psychic states, the elemental nature of life and our relationship with ourselves, others and the physical world, delivering the thought-provoking and compelling experience of LOOM. Adopting a richly hued palette and mysterious ambiguities within a suggestive soundscape, Ward evokes the physicality of the mysteries of life and the ties that tether us.
Ward’s long-time fascination with human potentiality for connectedness is rooted in his childhood experiences of isolated rural life in New Zealand, following family generations in farming on his father’s side, his mother a Jewish refugee who fled Germany. Ward’s deep understanding of the primal forces at play in human relations was burnished by the physicality of the work required to tame the hill country farm: his father, burned and scarred in the war, would “cut and burn and hew and dig and fence and sew grass. The seemingly endless flesh grafts to his body, from one part to another, creating smoothness in one place by leaving a hollow with a ragged scar line in another, was contrasted by perfectly straight fence lines that he dug and wired on seemingly impossible, hill and cliff edge terrain, they were like straight lines arcing across an almost human landscape creating for a time order, and form, and a boundary, a sort of sanctuary for my mother and us.”
In 2007 Ward received the New Zealand Order of Merit (NZOM) for his services to film; he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canterbury (Film and Fine Arts) where he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, the same university where he first studied art and completed a Dip FA (Hons) in 1978. A guest Professorship at the China Academy of Art, School of Fine Arts, Hanzhou, has been conferred on Ward, and he also runs workshops on new media at Shanghai University, School of Fine Arts.
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