Jo Torr: Self Portrait - The Shape of a Lineage
About this Event
Join artist Jo Torr for a special floor talk exploring Self Portrait: The Shape of a Lineage, a series of nine interconnected gowns tracing a direct ‘Torr’ family lineage from 1785 to 2026.
Seven of the nine gowns recognise female ancestors who became a ‘Torr’ through marriage, taking on a new family name and, in the process, becoming less visible within the historical record.
Jo Torr will share how she came to explore the ways women can disappear from history — as well as from their own family histories.
Without knowing exactly what these women wore, Torr has imagined a gown for each generation, created around the year of their real or imagined wedding. Using everyday vintage domestic fabrics and embroidery, she evokes the largely unrecorded lives of women as wives, mothers, caregivers and housekeepers. Rather than the luxurious fabrics traditionally associated with gowns, each work is constructed from materials such as bedsheets, tablecloths and bedcovers.
The names of the couples are embroidered into their associated gowns, creating a direct connection between the garment, the woman and the family history she helped create.
In this floor talk, Jo Torr will discuss the ideas, materials and stories behind Self Portrait: The Shape of a Lineage, and how the gowns bring women from the past into the twenty-first century.
With thanks to the collaborative partnership between the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata and Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House, Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Jo Torr is a New Zealand artist whose practice explores history, cultural exchange, identity and memory through costume, textiles and sculpture.
Her highly detailed garments draw on historical forms of dress while using contemporary art practice to reconsider the people, encounters and stories embedded within them.
Torr graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1988 and subsequently worked as a registrar at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Her experience within a museum environment has informed a practice that combines contemporary aesthetics with a distinctly museological approach, questioning how objects are collected, interpreted and used to construct histories.
For more than two decades, Torr has developed bodies of work investigating historical encounters between European and Polynesian peoples, often through the language of clothing and textiles. Her works bring together historical research, meticulous making and materials associated with particular cultures and periods. Objectspace has described her work as using costume and textile history as a lens through which to consider cultural exchange and early European and Polynesian encounters.
Her work has been exhibited widely in Aotearoa New Zealand, including at Objectspace, Tauranga Art Gallery, the National Library of New Zealand and other public galleries, and is held in major public collections including Auckland Art Gallery and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She was awarded the William Hodges Fellowship in 2011.
Her new exhibition, showing at Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House is called Self Portrait: The Shape of a Lineage. Torr turns this longstanding engagement with garments, history and memory towards her own family history. Through nine interconnected gowns, she examines the ways women can become less visible within historical and family records, using domestic textiles, embroidery and imagined garments to give material form to lives that are otherwise largely undocumented.
Tickets: FREE
Book your free ticket. Door sales may be available if not sold out prior. Doors open 15 mins prior.
No Parking on site. Accessible permit holders are required to book a parking space. Free parking is available on Arts Road at the Unversity Pay & Display Carpark., a two minute walk from Kate Sheppard House
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
NZD 0.00
