Chloe Summerhayes is an Ōtautahi/ Christchurch based artist who employs corporeal limitations such as failure and intuition to guide her exploration of theatricality and body consciousness. She references the romantic and phantasmic history of painting while simultaneously contending with the anxieties of the contemporary world. Conflict and friction as a generative force are a recurring theme within her practice, expressed visually as collisions between mundanity and theatricality. She has an ongoing preoccupation with the tension between nature and artifice.
She holds a BFA (First Class Honours, Painting) and an MFA (Distinction) from The University of Canterbury. Summerhayes has exhibited in both solo and group shows, most recently at Suite Gallery, with whom she has artist representation. She was the recipient of the Sawtell-Turner Prize in Painting in 2017 and the Ethel Rose Overton Scholarship in 2021.
Sam Walker was raised in the greenbelt of Ōtautahi/ Christchurch and is based there. Her artistic sentiments are a mix of a semi-rural upbringing and formative years navigating a fractured city centre. Through painting techniques that hover on perceptual thresholds, Walker creates eerie, liminal impressions that linger between recognition and uncertainty. Her subject matter may shift, but an enduring interest in internality persists, be it dream, memory or perception of the changing present.
She holds a BFA (First Class Honours, Painting) and an MFA (Distinction, Painting) from The University of Canterbury. Walker has exhibited in both solo and group shows, including a collaboration with Chloe Summerhayes in the exhibition, The Same Coin, at Ashburton Art Gallery. She was the recipient of the Harry van der Lecq Scholarship in 2019 (Ilam School of Fine Arts).