PRIME


Warwick Freeman, Gate pendants, 2015, gagat, stone, silver

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Gallery Funaki

4 Crossley St
Melbourne 3000

18 August - 18 September
Tue-Thu 10.30am-5.30pm, Fri 10.30am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm

Opening Tue 1 September, 6-8pm

Renowned New Zealand Warwick Freeman will present his 10th solo exhibition at Gallery Funaki. Warwick's 40-year practice encompasses the rich history and geological specificity of New Zealand landscape and jewellery history, wrought with a profoundly contemporary sensibility.  Familiar, sometimes even banal everyday forms rendered in stone, wood, bone, shell and metal take on talismanic properties; they are sophisticated, potent and inflected with the complex experience of New Zealand's cultural history. 

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Artist Warwick Freeman

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Warwick Freeman, Cutter pendant, 2010, jasper

Warwick Freeman, Curtain Hook pendant, 2009, whalebone

About the Artist

Warwick Freeman’s work has played an elemental part in the cultivation and recognition of New Zealand contemporary jewellery. Through the use of materials collected from his immediate and wider natural environment, Freeman creates work that explores themes of national identity and place.  A predominantly self taught craftsman, Freeman was introduced to jewellery making by Peter Woods in Perth, Australia in 1972 and returned to New Zealand to set up his own workshop.  In the 1980s he was partner in Auckland’s jewellery cooperative, Fingers.  Freeman was part of the seminal Bone Stone Shell exhibition in 1988 and has since gone on to exhibit internationally.  His work is in the permanent collections of the NGA Canberra, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among many others. http://galleryfunaki.com.au/artists/warwick-freeman/