Artist-designer Florence Weir (1899–1979) was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch and spent much of the 1920s and 30s working in England, Germany and the Mediterranean. She attended art schools abroad and was New Zealand’s first and only artist to train at the famed Bauhaus, where she developed a modernist mode of designing across different media, including collage, ceramics, and textiles. During these busy years of travel and study, Weir occasionally returned to New Zealand and held exhibitions inTe Waipounamu the South Island.

Florence Weir is also a work of fiction, created by contemporary artist Julia Holderness, who created Weir with fellow artist Richard Orjis in 2015. Since then, Julia has expanded an art ‘history’ for Florence Weir. In Figure Studies, Julia draws upon Weir’s ‘Bauhaus period’, specifically a fabricated workbook from Germany, 1926, and translates small-scale workbook images into a poster for public space.

Julia Holderness says,

“Through the construction of Florence Weir, I am in some sense proposing a form of time travel. Her insertion in the historical record enables a traversing across art movements, styles and mediums, and the forging of new and hypothetical collaborations. 

“Florence could be considered something of a paradox: on one hand she leads us, openly into the past, while at the same time there is something spectral about her. She can be thought of as a metaphorical ghost – a figure with diminished presence, as in a shadow or semblance, a trace or a remote possibility. Ghosts not only provide a metaphor for understanding our relationship with suppressed or overlooked histories, but they also suggest methods for practices of rehabilitation and reconstruction. While she is missing from canonical art-historical records, her shadow and trace still flickers. I am searching for her possibility in untold histories.”

Graphic design assistance by Simon Rycroft.

Limited editions of three related posters are for sale, with proceeds to the artist and SCAPE. Full details.