Expat angst

Hamilton artist John Hurrell writes about NZ artists living internationally in the February issue of Art Monthly Australia. He discusses last year’s exhibition ‘The expatriates: Frances Hodgkins and Barrie Bates’ in the context of the NZ government’s current $850,000 campaign to lure Kiwis home from abroad. “[2005] is a good time to look at the lives of two of NZ’s most recognised expatriate artistic talents – the time they spent on the other side of the world in England and the mental vacillations they went through concerning ‘home’ and identity.” The ambitious exhibition, which showed at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery Auckland University’s Gus Fisher Gallery, drew parallels between the unlikely duo of modernist Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) and conceptual artist Billy Bates (aka Billy Apple, 1935-).