Forrester Gallery Blog

Featuring thoughts and ideas from the Forrester Gallery.

  • Image: Penguins Diving in Deep Time, Manu Berry from the  exhibition Earth: caught in stone, Forrester Gallery 2022

    Inspired by Earth: caught in stone the wonderlab and Whitestone Aspiring Global Geopark have collaborated on an online educational programme.

  • Image: Anna McIntosh 1993

    Anna McIntosh’s name and face have popped up several times while I have been looking through historical Burns Memorial Art exhibition records, so I thought I would get her in to talk to about her involvement with the exhibition.

  • Image: Anna Wild

    Anna Wild was the exhibitions curator at the Forrester Gallery from 2004- 2007.

    Her colleagues at the gallery were Warwick Smith, Director, Rob Douglas and John Mitchell

    We asked her a few questions about her memories of the Burns Memorial Art Exhibition.

  • Children's Art Show catalogue cover, 1963

    George Burns whom the Burns Memorial Art Exhibition is named after was previously involved with another exhibition called the Children’s Art Show in the 1960s. It toured around the South Island and was sponsored by the Christchurch Star where George Burns was editor.

  • Warwick Smith and Rob Douglas 2006

    My involvement with Oamaru school art exhibitions predates Burns’ Memorial.  As a pupil at Waitaki Boys in the early sixties my art teacher, the late Colin Wheeler, encouraged me over several years to submit a number of paintings to the Christchurch Star Sun South Island Secondary Schools' Art Ex

  • Louise Rayner and Jane Edwards

    As I opened the gallery this morning, I was met by a woman waiting to meet her friend. I was to find out soon she was Louise Rayner from Waimate and her friend was Jane Edwards from Dunedin.

  • Germinated, 2020, Yvonne Gillespie

    I am a local Ōamaru artist. I moved here from Wellington and love the Otago region. I have a small space in my house where I am very happy painting. My work could be described as an assemblage of images (at first glance, seemingly unrelated) forming an harmonious whole. People see it as surreal.

  • Image: Forrester Gallery logo

    The Forrester Gallery has a lot to be excited about.

  • Image: George O’Brien (1821 – 1888), Oamaru from Pukeuri Hill, 1872, watercolour on paper, FG1985.11.1

    O’Brien was born in Ireland to an aristocratic but not wealthy family and appears to have trained as an architectural draughtsman before emigrating first to Australia and later to Dunedin in 1863.

  • Michele Beaufoy during Covid-19 Lockdown 2020

    Michele Beaufoy is a local Oamaru artist practitioner and teacher at Ara Polytechnic in Timaru. A significant part of her practice is ceramic work (produced out of the studio at Pottery-On-Tyne). Michele has been exploring the notion of harmony through balancing polarities (opposites).

  • Image: Peter Cleverly, artist talk for his Summer 2017-18 exhibition: Beautiful Knowledge

    Peter Cleverley is a nationally recognized artist who paints from his studio in Kakanui, drawing upon his bodily relationship with place, to make comment on the wider human condition.

  • Eion Shanks, Ned Kelly, 2020

    Eion Shanks was born in Kurow and attended the Dunedin School of Art Oamaru Campus in the late 1980s. He has held numerous exhibitions throughout New Zealand including two previous solo exhibitions at the Forrester Gallery.

  • Five Minutes with Art: Claus Edward Fristrom

    Claus Edward Fristrom (1864-1950), Homestead Titirangi, undated, Oil on linen on board, Collection of the Forrester Gallery FG2004.6.2) This week during my collection store checks I randomly selected a work by Claus Edward Fristrom, a Swedish artist who arrived in Queensland around 1884 and also

  • Five minutes with Art: T F Gallagher, Old Totara Tree – historic landmark, Oamaru 1948. NOM88/418.

    T F Gallagher, Old Totara Tree – historic landmark, Oamaru 1948. NOM88/418. During the Covid-19 lockdown I am doing 3 checks per week on the building and collection stores at the Museum & Archive and at the Forrester Gallery. I am checking security, pest and climate controls.

  • Marcel Proust, Literary Poster Great Writers Series

    Apart Together: Postcards from the Island

  • Culture Waitaki - Level 2 Update

    Find out what is happening during Level 2 of the Covid-19 lockdown by visiting our individual pages. Culture Waitaki is the collaborative home for Forrester Gallery, Oamaru Opera House, North Otago Museum, Waitaki District Archive and Waitaki District Libraries. 

  • Image:Opening Night of Ryan Moore: Grip tape & a can of paint

    The Community Gallery is situated on the first floor of the Forrester Gallery. It is a very popular exhibition space designed to support new and emerging artists of the Waitaki by offering a low charge but professional venue for displaying an art exhibition.

  • Forrester Gallery Exterior wall with scaffold

    Dooleys Masonry team are currently on site at the Forrester Gallery carrying out repairs to the stonework.
    The Forrester Gallery will be reopening soon.

  • Forrester Gallery opening cancelled until further notice.

    Our planned reopening on Saturday 2 May, 2020 has now been postponed as part of the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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