Christine Hellyar – DRAWINGS

Christine Hellyar was born in New Plymouth in 1947. She completed a Diploma in Fine Arts (Hons) at the Elam School of Art in 1970. Exhibiting consistently in New Zealand and internationally since then, Hellyar’s work has been included in many major exhibitions and is also held in most New Zealand public collections.

Always inspired by the beaches and bush around her home town, Hellyar won a Department of Conservation residency in 2003. She spent six weeks living in a hut on Mount Taranaki drawing and creating sculptures. Her focus was on the differing vegetation in the various micro-climates on the mountain, particularly the high and low parts where she felt totally encased in bush. Hellyar saw her Alpine Mt Taranaki drawings as a walk – “walking, and the lovely things that happen along the sides as you walk, are an important part of being up the mountain”.

Also included in the show are selected drawings from other Hellyar series. Plant Collections (2003) emphasises that rather than picking plants, she collects them by drawing them. In Praise of Nikau (2016) was as a celebration of the Nikau Track and her favourite palm. The Flood drawings (2005) were “a way of bringing the biblical to Piha – I know the tracks and streams out there and enjoy the extra water heavy storms bring. It’s also a way of bringing light that is not linear into the forest.”

“Drawing is lovely but you can’t just draw – it has to go somewhere else – it has to be more meaningful – it has to take on another life beyond drawing. I like crayon and dye and use a lot of each – it’s partly playing with materials and with ideas that you think are uniquely yours, and trying to say something that you can’t actually say in sculpture. You can’t say everything that’s in your head in one particular medium or one particular art discipline.”

Hellyar’s drawings on display in this show are both unique and evocative.