Associate Professor Richard Reddaway DipFA, MFA

Richard studied sculpture at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts (1986), spent six months at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1989), has an MFA from RMIT University, Melbourne (2000). He has exhibited widely, making sculptural installations, both sticks-and-stones stuff and the stuff of photography, in which the body, the figural, carries meaning as well as formal delight. His practice fills space with often noisy, colourful objects to explore, amongst other things, Chaotic complexity, Globalism and the local, and what it might mean to be Pākehā. His latest obsession is making art “work” to find a way out of neo-liberalism into the social, perhaps through a contemporary understanding of the Baroque

This has led to an interest in the relationship between Aotearoa New Zealand and the Americas, beginning in 2011 with his curation of “El Barroco de Aotearoa”, an exhibition of six contemporary New Zealand artists. Since then he has undertaken residencies at Arquetopia, Puebla Mexico, and No Lugar, Quito Ecuador, and was a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 2018 he worked on collaborative exhibitions in the United States at Wichita State University and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

This research suggests the Americas, like Aotearoa New Zealand, are new Baroque cultures; sites of cultural complexity where the dominant Western paradigm rubs against other ways of being in the world. Thus, the Baroque becomes a mechanism to explore our histories of colonial exploitation and the possibility of a de-colonised bicultural future.