Images and text of new work for the group exhibition ‘Ā Mua: New Lineages of Making’ at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt. The exhibition was supposed to be opening today 4/3/20 now postponed due to the Covid 19 lockdown in New Zealand. Stay Safe

Extended label for the exhibition written by Curator Karl Chitham

Hutchinson is currently based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Although originally a graffiti writer using spray cans as his tools, in 2006 he worked on a project for Blue Oyster Gallery that was to signal a shift in his practice. Called Concrete to Textile for the exhibition Hutchinson painstakingly embroidered a series of graffitied panels. Since then he has developed an approach that he refers to as pyschogeography where he explores urban environments, particularly the street on his journey to and from work. He then recreates the found structures and discarded objects he encounters as hand-embroidered sculptures.

He describes the process of collecting and recreating these objects as a way of tracing time and getting to know his immediate environment. He documents the sites he collects from, drawn to and highlighting the spaces people choose not to see, such as the pie wrapper caught under a rusting section of wire fence you see here. In 2019 he travelled to New York, extending his project to the suburb he was based in.

“Three of these works are part of the ‘Far from home’ series and are based on trash I picked up in Williamsburg, a suburb in Brooklyn, New York. They were found within a kilometre radius of where I was staying. Each morning I would spend an hour wandering around the neighbourhood photographing and collecting discarded ephemera, to reproduce as hand-embroidered objects when I got back to New Zealand.”