Making Spaces

Elam Te Waka Tūhura are honoured to host our former colleague, distinguished artist and painter Denys Watkins.

Making Spaces provides a platform for leading artists and arts professionals to share insights into their practice and ways of working. It creates space for their voices, exploring what they make, and why and how they make it.

Date | Thursday 21 May

Time | 6-8pm

Location | ELAM Lecture theatre - 432-136

Denys Watkins (b. Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, 1945) studied at Wellington School of Design, the Central School of Art and Design, London, and the Royal College of Art, London, and lectured at Elam School of Fine Arts for three decades (1980 - 2011).

In the mid-sixties, he once wrote, his first art book purchases were in Thames and Hudson’s Modern Movements collection: Dada by Hans Richter, Surrealism by Patrick Walberg, Pop Art by Lucy Lippard, alongside Ernst Gombrich's The Story of Art: “These were my first encounters with what it meant to be a 'Modern Artist'. Working my way through a labyrinth of processes and ideas, I've now reached an isolated state of making work, as a 'one-man band’.”

COLLISIONS: Life can be viewed as a series of collisions; collisions between who we want to be and who we are; between dreams and reality. We think we have one life, but we have several. We think we live in one world, but we live in many. These collide. Presenting a series of early images retained in my memory bank, I will discuss the occasions, collisions, and a collection of recent work in the painted process.