2007 Episode 2: Made In Dunedin / Seraphine Pick
Made In Dunedin
The last time gothic, faraway Dunedin was troubled by the suggestion that it might be a trendy and fashionable place was nearly quarter of a century ago when it kick-started New Zealand's alternative rock revolution with bands like The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines and a dozen more.
And it's happening again - though in a much more surprising way
than music.
Dress-to-depress Dunedin might seem an unlikely setting for a
cutting-edge fashion industry, but suddenly that's just what it
seems to be, with more than two dozen fashion designers now based
in the city, furiously working on influencing the way women dress
across New Zealand - and, in some cases, across the world.
For the last two decade, labels like NOM*D and Carlson have helped to secure Dunedin's fashion reputation overseas as a force to be reckoned with. And more labels have swiftly followed.
In part, the Dunedin labels owe their style aesthetic to their birthplace. The rugged coastline, the alternative music scene, the gothic atmosphere, the low overheads and the newly-established degree course in fashion design offered at Otago Polytechnic that's attracting some of New Zealand's most exciting fabric creatives. Not to mention the fashion incubator now operating locally.
Dunedin is literally bursting at the seams with eager-to-impress designers. With affordable work rooms smack bang in the middle of the CBD and willing mentors like NOM*D's Margi Robertson encouraging them to take risks and develop their own style, this new wave of designers is happy to stay put.
Made in Dunedin takes a stylish, music-filled look at Dunedin's fashion explosion, talking to designers like Tanya Carlson, Veronica Keucke and Juliet Fay and discovering this isn't a new experience for the city. In the 1800s, Dunedin was dubbed the "City of Style", being the place Auckland ladies of the day visited for their fashion needs.
Seraphine Pick
Séraphine Pick has haunted the New Zealand art world with
a constantly changing stream of emotionally charged paintings for
more than a decade. They are often faces, figures or domestic
objects, alone or in surprising collage, sometimes fragmented as if
strained by memory.
This film shows the work and life of this prominent Wellington
painter. It was filmed while Séraphine was painting Phantom
Limb, the work which eventually won her first prize in this year's
Norsewear Art Awards. By weaving an informal retrospective of her
art with documentary footage of her working life, (including some
extraordinarily intimate painting sequences) this film successfully
evokes the private internal world of Séraphine Pick the
painter.
Pick was born in Kawakawa, Bay of Islands, Northland and graduated
with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Ilam School of Fine
Arts, University of Canterbury in 1988.
In 1994 she was the recipient of the Olivia Spencer Bower
Foundation Art Award, and in 1995 she was the Rita Angus Artist in
Residence in Wellington.
In 1999 Pick was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and since
that time the artist has lived in Dunedin, moving to Wellington at
the beginning of this year.
Her art is held in the majority of public art collections in New
Zealand including Te Papa Tongarewa: Museum of New Zealand,
McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, Dunedin Public Art Gallery,
Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Chartwell Trust
Collection, Auckland and the Fletcher Challenge Collection.
