Through the Veil - Rebecca Stewart Exhibition

Built in 1916 as a sanctuary for shell-shocked WWI soldiers, this ward is a space etched with the memory of trauma and the pursuit of healing. While history books often focus on the men who occupied these rooms, these nine figures evoke the invisible figures standing just outside the frame: the mothers, sisters, and wives who carried the weight of that war in the marrow of their daily lives. They are the women who bore the quiet, exhausting burden of a nation's collective grief and the subsequent fracturing of the men they loved.

The figures share a material juxtaposition that carries this friction. The fluid fiberglass drapery acts as a shroud or a second skin, clinging to forms that feel as though they are actively emerging from the past. Erupting from this drapery is raw driftwood, salvaged from the braids of the Rangitata River. This wood carries the literal weight of the Canterbury landscape—its violent floods, biting droughts, and relentless erosion. The "disturbing" presence of the work stems from this acute friction: the tension between the elegant, human fluidity of the fabric and the jagged, weathered reality of the scarred wood, mimicking exposed bone and wounded skin.

By stripping these nine figures of the traditional gallery plinth, they command the historic timber floor on a 1:1 scale, forcing an inescapable face-to-face encounter. The viewer does not merely look at these women; they stand with them.