The works that comprise Housekeeping can be seen as a response to the changing responsibilities of the artist as a mother, director of a public gallery, trustee of Māori land holdings, editor of a poetry anthology, a teacher, a person participating in society, and so on. Buchanan’s exhibition comprises many formats, vocabularies, and tempos – only fitting for a project that is fuelled by the friction produced by a multifarious and overlapping zones of action.
A series of fifteen drawings titled The Years (2026) was initiated as a reflection on the artist’s changing working conditions after moving from Berlin to Aotearoa, in particular practicing without a designated studio for the first time in over a decade. The brightly coloured drawings, uniform in size, each feature a single vase of flowers drawn in a raw, expressive register rarely seen publicly in Buchanan’s practice. Flowers also feature in Studies beyond a permanent economy (thrust) (2026), a grid of twenty delicate observational drawings on the pink leaves of a daughter’s school notebooks. Buchanan’s choice of the flower vase – domestic subject matter that is so ubiquitous in women’s painting and literature – implicitly links the artist to a multiplicity of historical women. As with earlier projects, Buchanan embraces plurality both in the type of work she produces and in her ethics of production, eschewing ‘heroic’ authorship and claims to originality in favour of humble economy and contentedness to be one-among-many.
Concepts of whanaungatanga and interconnectedness through time are perhaps most directly conveyed in The Electrified Grid (2026) – the title of which is drawn from Anne Boyer’s poem The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock. The table includes several notebooks and pages of handwritten notations from Buchanan’s literal role as housekeeper alongside the household budgets of her mother and paternal grandmother, as they navigated turbulent economies of their own (Rawinia Buchanan’s budget is dated during WWII and Mary
Buchanan’s ledger accounts for the years directly after the 1986 stock market crash). The looped song playing in the headphones – Revolution Action by punk band Atari Teenage Riot – together with the saw-tooth motif and the samples of coloured latex pull this set of materials from nostalgia to a more charged space where private, intimate decisions have agency in the larger arenas of culture and politics.
As always with Buchanan’s work the gallery itself is considered as an container – for bodies, objects, and ideas. The main presentation walls of Coastal Signs have been spray-painted with silver enamel, obviously by hand, to create a shimmering, semi-reflective skin. Can tame anything(2016-2026) is an addition to and evolution of a series of wall drawings by Buchanan in recent years that have stained or marked galleries far and wide (including Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, Adam Art Gallery, and Toi o Tamaki, to name a few). Whether in soft watercolour or metallic enamel Can tame anything offers direct evidence of the artist’s labour in the gallery and an expanded concept of literally keeping house: a rising/receding tide of intervention designated by the proportions of Buchanan’s body.
The figures on Karangahape Road that are excluded (but often visible) from the gallery interior are acknowledged in People on the inside, people on the outside (2026), a work that designates the existing opaque vinyl on the large street-facing windows as a reproducible site-specific artwork. As with the Electrified Grid, and perhaps the entire body of work, Buchanan draws attention to the ultimately unavoidable blurring of boundaries, roles, and responsibilities one encounters as one attempts to navigate the often discordant experience of daily life.
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Ruth Buchanan (b. 1980, Ngāmotu New Plymouth) is an artist and uri of Taranaki who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She gained her BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, in 2002; her MA (Fine Art) from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, in 2007; and from 2008-2009 she was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
In the last decade Buchanan has realised significant exhibitions and commissioned works with: Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand; Govett Brewster Art Gallery; Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart; The New Commissioners/Neue Aufftrageber; Te Pataka Toi Adam Art Gallery; Badischer Kunsterverin; Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery; MASP Sao Paolo; Gwangju Biennale; Hamburger Bahnhof; Kunsthaus Bregenz; If I can’t Dance…, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern.
In 2018 she was awarded the Walters Prize. Buchanan is currently co-editing the collected works of Aotearoa author J.C. Sturm.
