14 December 2024
With my beautiful friend Francine Spencer we unveiled our windows at the Aigantighe At Gallery this week. I still can't believe it. Feels like a dream.
It's been 7 years since this part of the gallery closed after the Christchurch Earthquake, and at times I was deeply concerned it would never reopen again, and here we are, celebrating its reopening.
Enjoy the garden party this weekend and thank you to everyone who worked so hard to bring Aigantighe, the home of art in South Canterbury back to our community.
Thank you to Aigantighe team for the opportunity to create these windows with Fran.
My window design on the right is about standing strong and family.
"Like Aoraki Mt Cook, the Aigantighe Art Gallery has been both a home and a source of inspiration for Roselyn Cloake and stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and connection of people and place.
One of Roselyn’s most cherished memories was a family trip to the Hooker Valley. They arrived at the lake in cloud and spent time studying the rocks, and pieces of glacial ice. Her children were holding it up to the sky and trying to look through its bubbly icy lens, much like the glass in this work. They talked about when and where the ice may have formed, and how something so soft could grind the rock around them. The dust and the glacial melt from the mountain, to provide the Canterbury plains where they lived. The clouds lifted to reveal Aoraki. It was truly breathtaking.
“Even, with everything thrown at it, the deep forces of tectonic plates, wild wind, rain, ice, and melting heat, Aoraki continues to stand strong and tall. Always there, even when the clouds had rolled in. Aoraki reminds me that I can be strong too.”
Through her friendship with Francine Spencer, Roselyn saw a new perspective of Aoraki, as well as a landmark, it could be a symbol of mana whenua, and manaakitanga.
For Roselyn, the Aigantighe House has always been a place of personal and artistic significance. From twirling around at her father's photography exhibition when she was 3, to participating in Artarama, and volunteering for over 20 years with the Friends of Aigantighe, she remembers the fight to preserve the gallery during its closure after the Christchurch earthquake.
The community rallied together—artists, volunteers, and advocates—to give support and ensure the historic house would reopen, preserving and honoring the legacy of the Grant family and the South Canterbury Arts Society. This fight for the gallery’s future, standing strong, even in cloud, resonates in Roselyn’s work.
Her paintings have been inspired by the cubist movement, who showed the world as if looking though the facets of a crystal glass, the medium of stained glass was fitting Roselyns’s window is a tribute and a celebration to the enduring power of place, culture, and connection.