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Museum team works alongside Southland artist

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Te Unua Museum of Southland
Art and Culture
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Artist Janice Gill with some of the works she has gifted to Te Kupeka Tiaki Taoka Southern Regional Collections Trust, as part of her extensive archives catalogued by the Invercargill City Council's Museum Collections team.

Invercargill City Council’s museum and heritage services team has worked alongside a local artist to preserve the stories of the Southlanders depicted in her work – ensuring future generations would come to know the narratives of the region’s past.

Southland artist Janice Gill had been sporadically donating her works to the regional museum since about 1976, before making the deliberate decision to gift an extensive body of her creative career – from artworks to archival materials like sketch books and paint brushes –in 2018 and 2023.

Originally from Winton, Gill spent much of her life near Nelson. However, three years ago, she decided it was time to return to the south – and to make sure her work returned home, too.

In turn, ahead of a retrospective exhibition of her artworks planned for 2027, Gill had been working alongside the Collections team from Te Unua Museum of Southland to record the histories of her creativity in perpetuity. She had also been working on a new series of paintings, which would also be gifted to the regional museum collection.

“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.”

Collections technician Jessica Roylands (left) with Southland artist Janice Gill, at Te Pātaka Taoka Southern Regional Collections Facility in Invercargill.

Gill’s association with Southland’s regional museum had been a lifelong one, spanning back to when she was about nine years old.

“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.”

Te Unua Museum of Southland Team Leader Collections Tiffany Jenks said with more than 400 objects within her archives, spanning from the 1960s until the present day, Gill’s artistic practice predominantly focused on people, and often had a clear social commentary of both Southland and within a wider New Zealand context.

“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.

Invercargill City Council's Museum Collections team, from left Jessica Roylands, Tyra Ryan, Yiying Yang, Cowan Levey, artist Janice Gill, Ayden Dove, and Tiffany Jenks.

With the recent appointments of two new collections technicians, Jess Roylands and Yiying Yang, the Collections team had been able to dedicate resources towards the accessioning – entering items into a museum collection management system, with details about each object’s provenance including the source, date of creation, history, narrative, as well as information such as copyright information, condition, and location.

Part of the process had also included the packing of Gill’s collection to preservation standards – using conservation-grade materials such as acid-free tissue, archival card, and in the case of framed works, placement on the art racks at Te Pātaka Taoka Southern Regional Collections Facility, Jenks said.

“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.

Among the items in Gill’s archives were progress sketches the artist had made 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.”

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