Join us for an evening conversation at Sir Miles Warren Gallery as we continue to explore Pleasure Garden.

The discussion will bring together Amelia Fagence, Emma Wallbanks, and Mitchell Coll from Fabric Architecture to reflect on their new commissions for this project, and the ideas that shaped their contributions to the exhibition.

Set in Ōtautahi Christchurch – the Garden City – Pleasure Garden examines our interactions with nature within the urban form. Through works by architects, designers, and makers, the exhibition celebrates the garden as a site of creativity, communion, and nourishment, revealing how our cultivated and wild spaces express our relationships to place and the natural world.

Enjoy a relaxed evening in the gallery, with refreshments served and time to connect with the artists and their work. Spaces are limited for this free event, register here.

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Our gratitude to the Boosted supporters who have supported Objectspace in Ōtautahi’s summer programme around ‘the garden’ and to match-funders Rātā Foundation, Creative New Zealand and Christchurch City Council. 

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Amelia Fagence is an artist, designer and maker based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Her practice is informed by her upbringing in native bush in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland with artist parents, her architecture and design background, and her love of the natural world. Fagence holds a Master’s of Architecture from RMIT, Naarm Melbourne, and runs an eponymously named furniture studio in Ōtautahi, designing and making her own range of furniture alongside bespoke commissions.

Emma Wallbanks is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōhinehou Lyttelton. Alongside her exhibiting work, she makes clothing under her own eponymous label founded in 2019. Wallbanks’ practice takes cues from philosophy and the study of semiotics and visual linguistics. Clothing pieces are all one offs and, akin to her sculptural, installation and video works, feature repurposed materials and a rebellious sensibility. Transferring skills developed through her studies in sculpture, Wallbanks’ garments are all constructed through unconventional pattern cutting means.

Mitchell Coll is a Registered Architect and Director of Fabric, an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based architecture practice. Within architecture, Coll seeks to connect people to their environment, motivated by a strong belief in the power of built and natural environments to create wellbeing. Across two decades of experience, he has considered and been inspired by light and its impact on the sculptural and material qualities of buildings. Beyond architecture, Mitchell pursues ceramics, building, and object-making. These explorations feed into his architectural approach, in particular clay which offers a parallel medium to test ideas of texture, scale, and imperfection.