Wrong to be Right

EMMA BUGDEN

Occasionally you can walk into an exhibition and think, ‘This is it’. This is the moment the various strands in an artist’s career come together; the ideas and techniques coalesce into a resounding and powerful statement. I’ve been waiting for that show from Andrea du Chatenier.

Some artists begin their careers at a sprint but du Chatenier’s has felt more like a cross-country run.

After studying jewellery and textiles at Waikato Polytechnic, she undertook a sculpture degree in the early 1990s at Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1995. Appearing in group shows in Auckland and regionally, she began to teach at Unitec in 1996, going on to become a full-time lecturer across art and design.

For the next 20 years du Chatenier took a pluralistic approach to media, working across textiles, sculpture and photography; creating surrealistic and often fetishistic tableaux. She mined the brittle, mirrored spaces of late postmodernity to etch