Image from Maddie Leach’s collaborative artwork, ‘If you find the good oil let us know’
A creative essay by School of English & Media Studies senior lecturer Dr Ingrid Horrocks is currently featuring as part of the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.
The essay forms a key part of Maddie Leach’s collaborative conceptual art project ‘if you find the good oil let us know’, which is a finalist in this year’s Walters Prize, New Zealand’s premier contemporary art award. All four finalists are on display at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki until 12 October 2014.
The $50,000 Walters Prize, named after the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, is awarded for an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years. The prize aims to make contemporary art a more widely recognised and debated feature of our cultural life.
Dr Horrocks’ work of critical-creative prose is the closing piece in the publication, ‘if you find the good oil let us know’, which is the culmination of Maddie Leach’s 2012 Govett-Brewster Aotearoa New Zealand Artist in Residence project of the same name. The project as a whole unfolds an imaginative narrative of whales, cement, art works, scientists, seafarers, migrations, and oil companies via a community of letter-writers and readers.
Dr Horrocks’s contribution works both as part of the artwork, and as the single critical response to the work as a whole. It also involves a recorded performance of her work, which serves as the audio narrative of the project in its next incarnation online in association with the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.
Maddie Leach is a senior lecturer and postgraduate coordinator for fine arts, in Massey University’s Whiti o Rehua – The School of Art at Wellington.
Link: http://maddieleach.net http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/media/6032904/twp2014_catalogue.pdf