Had us running with you is a solo presentation of new works by Floresville, Texas based artist Kate Newby.

Fired glass pools in small ceramic puddles and forms sculptural window-panes. Clay takes the form of tiles mounted to an external wall and is hand-moulded into a multitude of husks scattered across the floor. A specific, limited material palette of clay, glass and bronze has produced a myriad of outcomes.

The exhibition consists of a series of sensitive interventions made to the building at 3 East St. In reponse to the site, Newby has focused on its windows, a raised dias, the nearby alleyway. The artist has made the whole building an artwork; by replacing its windows with her own glass panes, it is in fact opened up, punctured with many holes, so that air can flow in and out from many, many perforations.

Aside from a specific encounter with the built environment, Had us running with you is also an opportunity to encounter a range of textures and surface effects such as: slippery glazed and sharply-carved clay; verdigris developing on bronze and licked toffee-coloured glass. Though sometimes as slender as a window pane, seen occluded by doorways or appearing to be slight, physically intense forces are at play in Newby’s production techniques. Each artwork is the result of physical undertakings, acts of firing, cooling and extended duration.

There is a strong sense of return: while collecting broken glass from Galatos Street, to be incorporated into works, Newby reflected on her time spent working and living in the area. Her first apartment was on nearby Karangahape Road, and while studying at art school she made various works in galleries as well as peripheral spaces in the neighbourhood.

Locating artworks through where they are eventually installed as well as where they are made, Had us running with you is an exercise in collaboration and complicity, the fact or condition of being involved with others in the activity of making art. “I never work alone” states Newby; for her latest exhibition she visited potteries in Paeroa and Nelson, firing works with her father Stuart Newby, had bronze fabricated at a foundry in Bulverde Texas, and has included glass panes fabricated in Chartres, France and Whanganui with those made by herself in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition was made with friends, family and communities in response to local opportunities.

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Kate Newby (b. 1979) is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist based in Floresville, Texas. Newby’s work engages with a wide range of situations, using every-day actions and materials to displace and challenge how contemporary art is exhibited, viewed, and experienced. Newby’s projects draw directly from the locations in which they are presented, her work bouncing backwards and forwards between observation, the process of working, and the sites that she works in.

Newby received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2001 from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in 2007 and a Doctor of Fine Arts in 2015. Recent institutional exhibitions include YES TOMORROW, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi (2021); I can’t nail the days down, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2018) and Let me be the wind that pulls your hair, Artpace, San Antonio (2017). SHE’S TALKING TO THE WALL, a major new acquisition, is currently on display at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Work by Newby has been included in the recent group exhibitions: Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own: The Chartwell Show, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (2022), Réclamer la Terre / Reclaim the Earth, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022), and The Flames: The Living Arts of Ceramics, Musée d’art moderne de Paris (2021). Newby has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Walters Prize (2012) and residencies at the Chinati Foundation and Fogo Island Arts.