I have been commissioned for a diverse range of public art commissions, allowing me to put my work on the streets of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. It’s important to me that art is as accessible as possible, so it’s a great thing when it’s on the street for all to see.
My first major commission was by the Wellington Public Art Panel, to make work in an abandoned building on Kent Terrace. Since demolished, at the time it was full of mould, ivy and decay. I spent weeks there, extending the work that the processes of slow decay had already started. I called my intervention, Inhabitance.
After my work at The Obstinate Object at City Gallery, I was commissioned as part of Christchurch Art Gallery’s Outer Spaces project, to make a large scale installation on an empty lot that previously held a home.
Your uncontained movement has opened a new room in me, was part of White Night in Auckland. A femme, loose, treehouse in a tree in Parnell, I built for a week on the street, a structure that seems fragile but is strong as well as open.
As part of my Asia New Zealand Foundation residency to Bangalore, India in 2015, I built an installation on the boundary between the residency centre and the street. Responding to the built and small scale structures I researched there, as well as using local materials, I was able to create a work that local people related to as a response to where they live.
We Don’t Have to Be the Building was a large scale participatory public art project in 2016, researching queer activism from Homosexual law reform to today in Aotearoa New Zealand. The participatory research involved over 100 people, in open methods of gathering images, stories, and experiences. I built an installation tent where people could come and exchange stories for drawings, ran workshops, did interviews, drew people, and displayed the multi-layered, multi-media results in 16 panels on Courtenay Place, Wellington. They then toured to Auckland in 2017, shown in Silo 7.
Sian Torrington Artist 