Barbara Wheeler
Barbara Kristine Wheeler’s textile sculptures, embroideries, and baskets combine storytelling and humour. She is a solar punk crone, using materials-led methodologies to bring waste textiles and fibres back into usefulness, re-contextualising meaning and value, inviting personal connections and delight. These approaches anchor her practice in optimistic opposition to the ‘take, make, waste’ global model of consumption. Her home base and studio has been in Wellington New Zealand since 2019, but for the next few years she is travelling in Australia and Europe.
Steel, willow canes, stainless steel, earth pigments, rafia, denim, botanicals<br><br>Move Me is a human scale kinetic basket. Its egg shape is a powerful symbol of the past-in-the- present: new beginnings from the DNA of previous generations. When pushed, this work offers new perspectives of the land, river and flora of the Waikato region. You are encouraged to be curious.
