Future Nostalgia:  Tori Beeche  |   Seraphine Bonheur |  Marinda Vandenheede

Future Nostalgia features new works from three artists.

Each artist art draws from the past to speak to us in the present, reformulating objects, ideas and moments from personal and historical archives.
The result is works which invite viewers to consider the value of nostalgic reflection through our connection to memory, object and place.

Tori Beeche‘s paintings explore the link of memory and nostalgia to the physical spaces we occupy. In the tradition of Western genre painting, where a room becomes a site for inquiry, her practice examines the forces at play in the representation of an interior space. Utilising the basic compositional components of genre painting, such as a window, a mirror or a doorway melded with decorative elements and pattern motifs, to examine the influences we absorb and how the spaces we occupy shape our understanding of the world.

The paintings inhabit a spatial dimension that is formed by the social, emotional, and aesthetic narratives that the spaces we live in hold. Although she grew up in a suburb in Auckland, the narratives of her lived space were Scandinavian. From the décor of her family home to the social and emotional narratives of family life, her Norwegian father’s influence was profound. Childhood memories of stories and visits to her father’s homeland felt like fairy tales sparking her imagination and creating the lens of nostalgia that are layered into Tori’s paintings.

Constructing her paintings through a melding together of old black-and-white family snapshots, referencing flashes of coloured textile and decorative motifs that are in our memory-banks or imagined spaces from novels we have read. The canvas offers a space to re-negotiate history by connecting different locations in a heterotopian dimension. Asking how re-imagining our past could re-configure the present and, perhaps, re-kindle hope for the future.

Seraphine Bonheur’s delicate embroideries are microcosms of myth and mystery, as well as personal meditations on the passage of time and the inner landscapes of the mind. Bonheur takes inspiration from universal mythologies, drawing symbols and motifs from both European & Pacific culture.

Seraphine trained in the high-fashion epicentre of Paris, where she learned centuries old techniques. Her carefully selected materials are sourced from the workshops of Chanel, with each artefact and thread carrying with it a material residue of the past, as if evoking memories of its former locale. Yet it’s the curious synergy of universal storytelling, material object, and it’s re- arrangement, that creates these compelling contemplative spaces, where the past joins the future and nostalgia takes shape for tomorrow’s lore

Marinda Vandenheede creates sculptural objects, works on paper, and paintings that employ natural, used, and discarded materials. “I tend to work with weathered, natural materials that testify to the beauty of decay.” Such materials lend a sensitivity and sense of wonder to her works that contrast her use of lines and geometric forms Her paintings and drawings often contain a rough-edged, imperfect geometry combined with used paper and other repurposed surfaces – abstract, yet very much part of this world. Her objects border on the surreal as they repurpose recognizable worn and aging items and worldly fragments.

Vandenheede’s practice embraces imperfection, atrophy, and stillness. It is a rejection of perfection, disconnectedness, and consumerism. “I use discarded, out-of-use things that no longer meet the exacting standards of our Western society, giving them a new life as works of art.” Layers of time and narrative potential are embedded in her materials. She invites viewers to take a moment to be still and to take a deeper look.