Someplace Else speaks to a desire for travel, to discovering and exploring other places. It highlights tensions between home and overseas, between tourist and citizen, between foreigner and resident. Currently, such travel reverie is particularly nostalgic, its future uncertain.
Out of a trans-national relationship between Hungary and Aotearoa New Zealand between 1991 and 2019, Stevenson accumulated a body of drawings – recently published in the artist’s book Someplace Else. She drew on travel ephemera such as airplane tickets, bus passes and museum entries to create intimate works, using stitching, pin-pricks and mark-making. This installation is a further re-mapping: unfolding along crease-lines of travel memory.
About Louise Stevenson
Louise Stevenson is a multi-disciplinary artist, born in the Solomon Islands and based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She works across drawing, painting, photography, book-making and moving-image, and sometimes writes.
Stevenson holds a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts. She was a senior lecturer for the Manukau School of Visual Arts and has published papers on tropical modern architecture in the Pacific.
Exploring shifting relationships to place and time, Louise is interested in fluid situations of ‘outsider-ness’, drawing on experiences of growing up in the Solomon Islands and a long-term connection to Budapest, Hungary. Colonial-modern architecture in the tropics is a further significant focus, in which she re-encounters a family archive of photographic and film material.