Print Making

Prints shown at Carrying On, Chambers Gallery, February-March 2025

“In print-making, which is a more process-driven work, I have tended to explore the inner world of being – relationships and interconnectedness- by making and slowly printing the symbols and forms which the materials suggest. In these works I consider Selfhood in relation to The Other. My harakeke work is always firstly about my desire to connect with the Earth through the plant world, using the intelligence of my hands, within a matrix of ancient and contemporary weaving practices. This gives me a home within the worlds of women’s handwork, Tangata Whenua, and craft, the progenitor of technology.

Seeking the integration of my several threads of art practice has been a rich source of inspiration and direction for my work. Each form has fed into the other. The explorations continue, with painting once again pushing into the foreground.” Part of the artist’s statement. Check out the sculpture and painting pages for more from the exhibition.

Diversion Gallery, Picton, July 2024

“There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation.” – Michel de Montaigne (How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell, Vintage, 2011).

Biologicals, Chambers Gallery, February 2024

“In Audrey Eagle’s illustrated book of native trees and shrubs the life-sized outline of the leaf from the puka tree (Meryta Sinclairii) extends beyond the page of the book/pukapuka. These giant leaves are leathery, long lasting like a papyrus asking to be written upon. In the continuum of Webster’s prints the Puka leaf is a repeated presence, like a speech bubble it opens up the conversation the artist begins with. The large oval shape with slightly asymmetrical edges has satisfying human connections; uterus-like, an enclosed and protected space. In Te Reo puka also means lungs, our life-giving inner space.

Overlaying fine layers of subtle and sombre colour containing patterns referencing the microscopic, the original puka shape becomes an echo, at times a shadow or afterimage. Almost an absence of a presence, a palimpsest. The inclusion of human figures that are veined, bound organically, x-rayed, brings the scale of the molecular to the human body. The simplicity of the puka shape embedded with soft pattern and holding small scale figures, become portals to a clearer way of thinking about our integral participation with the natural word: the fact that we are the natural world, despite our penchant for a blinding addiction to materialism and perpetual vanity.” – Evelyn Hewlett, Punakaiki, 2024