Dear Ursula, With Regards to the River...

Six North Canterbury artists reunite, inspired by their local awa (Rakahuri-Ashley) and by poet Ursula Bethell’s urgent call to regard our rivers, a call which is just as relevant a century later. These new works emerge in response to these sources, drawing on each artist’s creative flow and shaped by in-flowing streams of thought and practice from other members of the group. These creative confluences inform this collection, creating fresh channels of understanding and connection both to our environment and to one another.

Exhibiting Artists

Catherine Day, an artist and musician with an MFA from Massey University, lives in Rangiora. She draws on experiences of walking in mountains and beside rivers to explore the notion of deep time, the powerful presence of these places, and how they can anchor us in our daily lives. Her work process involves an exploration of environments while walking, photographing, drawing, and painting. She collects stones, leaves, roots, and detritus from the Rakahuri, notes changes in the current, the way light enters water, the texture of stone when embossed onto paper.


Nikki Ferguson-Brown is a mixed-media artist based in Oxford. Of Pākehā descent, her creative practice is driven by a commitment to reflecting on colonial histories of social and ecological destruction, and her own entanglements in these. The works shown here aim to encourage reflection about what has been lost, inspiring action to restore our relationships with the ecologies of Aotearoa and with one another.


Louise Johns’s jewellery is often bold, merging the irrelevant with perceptions of value.
Based in Rangiora, Louise explores the exposed wind-blown, wide braided stretch of Rakahuri; where nearby the threatened little “bill-curved-to-the- right” ngutu pare wrybill hatch and nest. For Louise, Ursula Bethells’ hundred-year-old poem resonates alongside Rachel Carson’s writings, with their questions and calls to arms. The evocative phrases ‘archipelagos of silver’,“tranced lagoons”,”ripples and silence sing together”, appear somber, stark and unrelenting. Louise’s collection presents materials as talismans as reminders of the barely perceived. The pieces invite and entice the wearer to take a closer look. The collection is a call to consider one’s own relationship and journey alongside their own river’s ecosystem.


Suzanne McDonnell’s practice combines painting and sculpture to explore material, environmental, and social themes. In this series, her paintings and sculptures invite viewers to reflect on their relationship to and between, bodies of water and history. Reflecting on her own connection, as a Pākehā without ancestral or conscious spiritual ties to the land, she questions how attachment is formed. After many hours of time spent with the river, walking, being still, mapping, photographing, and sound recording, and drawing on childhood nostalgia, her works layer personal memory with questions of identity, belonging, and disconnection


Kate McIntyre’s work finds its voice through surrounding environments, objects, and histories. With a BFA in Sculpture, she uses found and often tediously transformed materials to reveal the emergent beauty that arises both despite and from the entanglements of te taiao with modern human activity. In this group of works, harakeke, driftwood, pine, and baling twine are witnesses to the slow-flowing drama that has threaded through the landscape as time passes in ways inexplicable. Messages, postcards - to or from, now or then - provide glimpses of hope for what is yet to come.


A fascination with the medium of watercolour and an enduring love affair with this magnificent country fuel Russell Perry’s art. Impetus for current works is sourced from consideration of impacts on our local landscapes made by settlers earnestly clearing, burning, and building. History records our local forest fringes and riversides once alight with colour and birdsong. The forest was large and wonderful. Kakariki chirped in great multitudes. Those reflections are taunted now by silence; the forest hugely diminished. What cost is progress!