Hayley Theyers - 'Ex Libris'

'Ex Libris' is showing in room 4 of Photospace Gallery from 19 August to 3 September, 2022, but is likely to run longer. (The series was first shown at the Katherine Mansfield birthplace, 25 Tinakori Rd, Wellington, in 2021.)
Gallery hours: 10am-3pm Mon-Fri, 11am-2pm Saturdays, Closed Sundays and public holidays.

Hayley exhibited at Photospace Gallery in 'Communicating Vessels' with Mary Macgregor-Reid and Kate Rampling. The photobook of this exhibition is available at this year's Photobook / NZ Book Fair at Te Papa on 20th August.

Artist statement:

A writer as an adult is a reader as a child, and the first books Katherine
Mansfield read were Victorian children's stories; Mother Goose, The Brothers
Grimm, The Water Babies, and the Alice books. Most of these books were
illustrated, often with engravings, by artists such as John Tenniel, George
Cruikshank, Arthur Rackham and Kate Greenaway.
 
In England, Mansfield reinvented her New Zealand childhood to impress her
friends; her remembered early reading, as part of that childhood, helped to
colour it for her, adding layers to the antipodean world she would explore in
her writing.
 
Her New Zealand child characters moved through landscapes that most of
her readers had not seen, awakening those reader's own childhood
imaginings, fuelled by the same illustrated works Katherine had read.
In Ex Libris Katherine Beauchamp dreams, transported into the pages of the
books that first awaken her literary imagination.

- Hayley Theyers, 2021

Hayley Theyers, from Ex Libris (1)

Hayley Theyers, from Ex Libris (2)

Hayley Theyers, from Ex Libris (3)

Hayley Theyers, from Ex Libris (4)

Hayley Theyers, from Ex Libris (5)