EDWARDS+JOHANN (Victoria Edwards & Ina Johann) are Ōtautahi-based and have been working in tandem since 2007. Building an impressive oeuvre over this time, the duo has been a finalist in all major New Zealand Art Awards, winning the NZ Painting & Printmaking Award in 2016. They have been invited Artists in Residence in France, Scotland, Switzerland and Aotearoa, and were also selected the inaugural artists for the Volcanic Artist Residency in Whakatāne in 2018. Their latest residency project at Sutton House/Ōtautahi facilitated the development of new sculptural works for their exhibition Mutabilities – Propositions to an Unknown Universe shown at The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (13 September – 16 February 2025).
As visual storytellers they are interested in the unseen, the untold, the unfinished, the unpolished and the uneasy. Most of their works develop and evolve along a seam which is a point of connection but also a space of friction, tension and inevitable fragility. This territory reflects a basic human condition… to connect, work, play and test the space they inhabit in order to grow… and deal with crisis.
Edwards+Johann’s Geomorphic Acts and Geomorphic Conversations are nnother take and flow on from the volcanic artists’ residency project in Whakatāne. The works interweave sculpture with photography, painting and drawing. Strange concretions made from both natural and unnatural materials, create painterly, protruding and unruly shapes. Evolving in a lab-like experimental modus, they reveal what is not known, not quite here, has not fully formed yet. Vulnerability, change, transience, permanence and the precariousness of life are at play here.