Della Rees
Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga exhibiting artist
True Colours (2014)
Born in the Manawatu, Della lived and worked in Britain for nearly thirty years before recently returning home to Aotearoa New Zealand.
1994 Graduating BA Hons. Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores University (UK) and gaining her Fine Art Masters in 2011 from Sir John Cass School of Art, Media and Design, London (UK).
Della’s practice combines and re-purposes materials and techniques to create new aesthetic forms and intriguing interventions. Using a multidisciplinary approach to each project the context and concept grows organically, dictating the final outcome. Responding to a particular space or location, exploring concepts around human impact on the environment. Previous projects have often been ephemeral or transitory in nature and sometimes located outside the conventional art space their appearance and disappearance intended not only to provoke a response but also to engage a wider audience.
Exhibiting regularly since 1994, currently living and working in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga 2020
For the Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga project I explored ideas around Biophilia, the hypothesis that humans are innately attracted to nature, an unseen instinct and considered how people have reconnected with the natural environment through periods of lockdown around the globe and whether this will change future human behaviour toward it?
The concept that under the same sky, we are all connected, wherever we are. This work combines spontaneous and expressive print, collage and drawing with more considered reworking informed by colours and forms in nature. Capturing the spaces in between with woven elements providing an interpretation of connection, which is linear and at the same time broken or disrupted.