Page Galleries is delighted to showcase an exclusive collaboration between artist Reuben Paterson (Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Tūhourangi) and Dilana Rugs.
While renowned for his works made with glitter, the Auckland based artist regularly engages with a variety of materials and formats within his practice – including painting, sculpture and digital art – and has previously collaborated with a number of leading designers. This latest project with Dilana has resulted in an impeccable creative partnership. Dilana established its Christchurch workshop in 1980 and since then has worked with recognised New Zealand artists to create limited edition rugs that offer a synergy of artistry, design, luxury, and comfort. The graphic nature of Paterson’s practice, which combines modernist traditions of pattern and form with traditional Māori motifs, has been beautifully translated into a small edition of hand knotted and tufted rugs based on traditional Persian techniques.
Ikarangi (Galaxy) incorporates a practice that emerged in workshops during the Safavid Dynasty for King Abbas of Iran, where wool and silk pile was burnt back to reveal rugs of gold and silver. Here, the fire singed optical surface of the rug is punctuated with delicate flowering poppies. For this exhibition, Paterson and Dilana have created I Love You in the Morning, a wall hanging with gold lurex and wool thread handwoven through the rug. The Midnight Garden features Dilana’s internationally trademarked silver lurex and viscose thread; creating a glittering effect evocative of the night skies and the dew that gently settles on foliage in the evening hours, it is imbued with the softness of night. Ko Te Aroha Anō (Love is Like Water) features two different Kōwhaiwhai; the mangopare referring to the hammerhead shark, and the mango tipi to the white pointer shark, that whakapapa the designs back to their origins in the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea.
Coupled with these rugs are a series of Paterson’s inimitable glitter paintings – featuring botanical, designs, optical patterns, and kōwhaiwhai – and a series of sculptures made up of stacks of colourful crystal forms that reach upward to the firmament.
For Paterson, the exhibition reads almost as a history of his practice to date. Together, these works act as a bridge between the earth and ether, the land and sea, and everything that is traversed amid. In Māori terms these designs are the heroic passage of whakapapa on a journey to the primeval parents of Ranginui the Sky Father and Papatūānuku the Earth Mother.
