Permission Slip leans into embodied curiosity, playing together, and learning-with. The exhibition features a video portrait of a stream and its friends by Adam Ben-Dror and Xin Cheng, a double-sided painting-membrane-picnic blanket by Raewyn Martyn, and squishy oversized play items by Aya Yamashita Francis. In these works, research is firmly located in the world and involves a tangle of collaborators in active exchange. Artists, neighbours, rocks, bacteria, children, insects, waste, pathways, and spiderwebs are all contributors. What can we learn together? Where does it happen? How can we make it pleasurable?
A series of lunchtime events accompanies Permission Slip. The events take inspiration from primary school field trips and activities, allocating time for play, curiosity, and short excursions beyond the walls of the gallery. Please see the event listings for details.
→ Play Lunch
→ Picnic Reading
Please note that soft shell will be shut briefly on Saturdays from 11am-12pm for off-site Picnic Reading events.
About the artists
→ Adam Ben-Dror
Adam Ben-Dror is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and inventor based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. With Xin Cheng he co-runs Local Making, a design studio & neighbourhood-scaled laboratory for resourceful living and making. He is co-founder of the Negative Emissions and Waste Studies Program (NEWS) – waste and creativity research project. Adam teaches composting through the Compost Collective and design at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland. Adam holds a Bachelor of Design Innovation from Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington and a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts from Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland.
→ Xin Cheng
Xin Cheng works across art, social design and local ecologies. She was a co-director of the artist-run space RM in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2007-2012), holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hamburg University of Fine Arts (DE), and currently teaches design at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland.
→ Raewyn Martyn
Raewyn Martyn is Pākehā Tangata Tiriti (Scottish, Irish & English), and was born in Ōamaru. She is an artist and teacher, currently working as a Lecturer of Painting at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury. Her exhibition practice involves gallery and site-based work made in Aotearoa and internationally. She makes site-responsive paintings composed during attentive occupation of sites and situations—these artworks change over time and challenge the stability and temporality of surface, medium, and site. She studied toward an MFA in Painting and Printmaking at VCUArts in Richmond VA. (2011-2013), and then worked as an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Antioch College in Ohio (2013-2016). She was a research participant at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands (2016-2017) and completed a practice-based PhD at Toi Rāuwharangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University (2023).
→ Aya Yamashita Francis
Aya Yamashita Francis has a playful approach to making and teaching. Her practice often involves everyday materials or concepts – like discarded paper, raincoats, or in this case, play equipment - in ways that are surprising, sensory, and sometimes silly. The things she makes encourage curious interactions between bodies, materials, and processes. How do these things play together? Since graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland in 2016, Aya has worked as an educator in primary school, preschool, and gallery settings in Tāmaki Makaurau, and become a mother. Her work draws on these experiences and looks for fun in between.
Adam Ben-Dror & Xin Cheng
Stories from Te Auaunga Oakley Creek, 2024
Single-channel video; duration 42 min, 19 sec
Featuring the more-than-human creatures who live between Kukuwai Park, Alan Wood Reserve, Harbutt Reserve, Friends of Oakley Creek Te Auaunga Nursery, Te Auaunga Walkway, Wairaka Stream; Dorothy Maddock, Wendy John, Colin Maddock, Gina Hefferan, Chris Brown, Friends of Oakley Creek Te Auaunga July Community Tree Planting at Waterview Glades with the community and Conservation Volunteers New Zealand.
With thanks to Sam Longmore and Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha, Rangitāne). Made with support from the Asian Artist Fund, Foundation North and Creative New Zealand