Forrester Gallery Is All a Flutter

Published on 06 July 2022

The Forrester Gallery will be all a flutter with our new exhibition opening on Saturday the 9 July. Dunedin artists and designers, Hannah Joynt and Gavin O’Brien are taking us back to the 70s by filling our Main Gallery with beautiful butterflies and moths inspired by the 1970s New Zealand stamps.

Flutter is the exhibition of a collaborative project by Hannah and Gavin; two lecturers from the Otago Polytechnic Te Maru Pūmanawa College of Creative Practice and Enterprise. Together they developed three reproducible Kiwiana-like artworks based on the 1970’s New Zealand stamp series by Enid Hunter which feature native moths and butterflies.

Flutter not only celebrates these iconic articles of New Zealand design and reflects on the dwindling hobby of stamp collecting, but also directly engages and contributes to environmental conservation efforts around native New Zealand moths and butterflies.

A portion of each sale is donated to conservation project AhiPepe|MothNet, a citizen science project that aims to engage teachers, students and whānau with moths, and through moths with nature and science.

Visitors who are inspired by the works on display can make the most of our latest wonderlab creation station and develop their own moth or butterfly specimen. Newly discovered specimens can be taken home or displayed in our Vault Gallery.

In the lead up to this exhibition opening Hannah Joynt will be in the Gallery installing the show alongside our team and then sharing this project with Friends of the Forrester Gallery at their AGM on Tuesday evening (5 July).

Flutter is on display from Saturday 9 July until 4 September 2022 at the Forrester Gallery. The creation station will be available the whole time as well as some bonus activities in the second week of the school holidays.

Image Credit: (detail) Tussock, 2022 and Copper Glade, 2022, Hannah Joynt and Gavin O’Brien, acrylic on bamboo ply.