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Southland artist Janice Gill has been donating work to the regional museum since about 1976, but it is the stories behind those works — the names, the faces, the reasons — that the Collections team at Museum of Southland has been working to preserve alongside her.
Gill, originally from Winton and now returned to the south after many years near Nelson, made the deliberate decision to gift an extensive body of her creative career to the museum in 2018 and 2023. The gift spans artworks through to archival materials like sketch books and paint brushes. She has also been working on a new series of paintings, which will also be gifted to the regional museum collection.
Ahead of a retrospective exhibition of her artworks planned for 2027, Gill has been working with the Collections team to record the histories of her creativity. With more than 400 objects in her archives spanning from the 1960s until the present day, her practice has predominantly focused on people, often with a clear social commentary of both Southland and New Zealand.
Museum of Southland Team Leader Collections Tiffany Jenks said the collection carries weight beyond technique.
"If you disconnect an item from its history, over time it simply becomes something old – and just because something is old, doesn't mean it warrants being in a museum. In Janice's case it's not the skill of the artist alone that gives value to her pieces within the collection, but Janice herself – her upbringing in Winton, and the influence Southland has had on her art," Jenks said.
"Often museum professionals don't have the opportunity to garner knowledge directly from an artist. Janice has had the foresight to gift her works, so that she can share her process as an artist, the development of her craft, changes in her life and the impact of these on her work, and the stories behind what led to her creating pieces. For our team, to be able to work alongside Janice as she shared her insights was really exciting.
"It really brings the work to life. Hearing Janice speak about her relationship with her family, and then connecting that to her piece The Face I Was Looking For Was Not There, which depicts her father's funeral, it hits different," Jenks said.
"Janice's collection captures an insight into our culture as Southlanders and New Zealanders. It reflects who we were, who we are, who we could have been, and who we may come to be," she said.
Among the items in Gill's archives are progress sketches for the painting Bus Stop (Winton Post Office), in which she included drawings of real residents at the time.
"Janice remembers the names and backgrounds of the real people depicted in her work, and the reasons why she included them in certain pieces. Working with her gave our team the opportunity to preserve Janice's memories of the everyday Southlanders in her work, whose visages and presence would have been otherwise lost to time."
Gill's own connection to Museum of Southland reaches back to childhood. Around the mid-fifties, she became a junior member after a fundraiser reached the schools.
"The museum must have been having a fundraiser of some kind, around the mid-fifties, and they sent a note around the schools asking children to become junior members. My mum and dad came up with the one shilling, which would have been equivalent to three loaves of bread, and I became a junior member of the museum. That card became my absolute treasure of childhood," she said.
"Like a lot of Southland children, I thought the museum was my place – but really, I mean our place. I always had this feeling of deep attachment to it."
She said the collaboration has felt like coming home in more than one sense.
"It's the people working with the museum who have very much made me feel at home. It's always a challenge to come back after so many years away, but my painting has been the introduction to lots of interesting and lively people," she said.
"The people working with the collection these days are much younger than I am – about half my age – and it's been just wonderful to see that they understand what the work is about. It is a little bit like having grandchildren, and they can take my work forward into the future. I can't ask for better than that."
The Collections team, boosted by the recent appointments of technicians Jess Roylands and Yiying Yang, has been accessioning Gill's collection — entering each item into the museum's collection management system with details on provenance, date of creation, history and narrative. Packing has been done to preservation standards using acid-free tissue, archival card, and for framed works, placement on the art racks at Te Pātaka Taoka Southern Regional Collections Facility.
Download high-res images from this release (credit Invercargill City Council).