Visual Expressions: Opening Event and Craft Market

The Whakatāne Society of Arts and Crafts is holding an outdoor market and indoor demo-day on Saturday, 16 June to celebrate the opening of its new Visual Expressions exhibition.

Community members are welcome to come along to Te Kōputu a te whanga a Toi – Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre – and explore the exhibition, watch a live painting demonstration, try crafts at the activity table, or purchase wares from Society members at the market outside.

The 2018 Whakatāne Society of Arts and Crafts exhibition, Visual Expressions, addresses a theme of black, white and wood, and showcases members’ diversity of inspiration, method and materials.

The Society is one of the Bay of Plenty’s original champions of the traditional craft movement and is keeping artistic skills alive in the face of fast-moving technology, mass production methods, and planned obsolescence. Around the world, and here in our back yard, societies of arts and crafts bring people together in pursuit of hand-made processes, collective purpose and ongoing comradery.

The exhibition includes representative works from groups of local painters, potters, wood workers and fibre crafters. It reveals traditions handed down through generations of makers through familial relationships, teaching, and the ongoing work of arts and craft guilds.

Since the 1960s, Whakatāne Society of Arts and Crafts has nurtured a range of creative groups and interests. The organisation continues to offer classes and workshops to anyone wanting to develop a new artistic skill and those seeking to find their creative spark.