Opening Speakers:
Hon. Henry Puna, Prime Minister of the Cook Islands
Sylvia Marsters, Exhibiting Artist
Succeeding her nine panel series, New Yorkers Don't See Flowers, VOLTA Art Fair, NYC 2014 - and her increasingly complex gardenia works for the Auckland Art Fair - 2016, Marsters new flower compositions take on a heightened sense of realism.
The artist states, 'NYC influenced my artistic eye seeking out more structural form, bold composition and scale. Back home in the studio I had vivid recollections of the long flight home. Vast plains of undulating earth, great canyons and mountainsides with veins of water flowing through them like the veins in flowers.'
Encountering a series of Gauguin works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marsters was fascinated by the sense of something intrinsically Polynesian shining brightly in amongst the frenetic pulse of a major world city.
Sylvia Marsters new works take on a fresh sense of resolve, generating hibiscus compositions of striking detail, veritable road-maps of patient brushstrokes making up her increasingly detailed arrangements. The series, Hibiscus Hedge transports the viewer to a state of nostalgia, back to a less complicated existence on an island were life was not so hurried, and smiles where as abundant as the red hibiscus that seemingly made up the majority of village hedges.
