Media release
24 November 2008

$125,000 for the New Generation

Five New Zealand artists have each received $25,000 and been recognised for their early achievements at the second biennial Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Awards.

The Awards, held in Christchurch, were presented by Freemasons New Zealand, who provide the funding for the New Generation Awards.

The Awards are available to artists practicing in any art form. Recipients are selected by a curator without knowing they are under consideration.

The recipients of the 2008 New Generation Awards are music-maker Jeff Henderson, new media artist Alex Monteith, lyric soprano Madeleine Pierard, writer/actor Jo Randerson and writer Anna Sanderson. Full biographies are below.

Arts Foundation of New Zealand chairman Ros Burdon said the New Generation Awards are made to artists to give them an early boost. While New Generation Artists have high level achievements, they have many more years of art making ahead of them.

“The Awards enable recipients to invest the funds in new work or equipment, high level education or other development opportunities, or in some cases to buy time to focus on producing work. We are delighted to once again join with Freemasons and congratulate them all.”

The 2008 curator is Gregory O’Brien, a Wellington-based writer, teacher, and painter who said the task of selecting the five artists was “incredibly difficult but illuminating.”

“I spent over a year whittling down a long list which included over fifty strong possibilities. It was an exciting, difficult yet also illuminating process. It set me thinking about some very basic things about what art is and what it is that artists do. 

“When you look at this group of youngish artists, I think what you are seeing is five individuals whose creative worlds are expanding around them. This, in due course, pushes back the boundaries of the real world as well.” 

Grand master of Presenting Sponsor Freemasons New Zealand, Stan Barker, said: “Freemasons New Zealand shares the Arts Foundation’s belief in the importance of celebrating artists whose futures are as exciting as their pasts, not just because the artists deserve support, but also because the arts enrich society.”

Managing director of Principal Sponsor, Forsyth Barr, Neil Paviour-Smith, said: “Forsyth Barr partners with the Arts Foundation on many levels to honour and celebrate artistic excellence in New Zealand. The New Generation Awards were created by the Foundation to support those with proven talent who are at an early stage of their career. This recognition and financial assistance will enable them to continue on their journey, be it at home or on the world stage. We are proud to be a part of the Foundation’s vision for these artists and congratulate all of this year’s recipients.”

The 2008 Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award recipients join the New Generation Award recipients of 2006: visual artist Eve Armstrong, musician Warren Maxwell, writer Tze Ming Mok, jeweller Joe Sheehan, and film-maker Taika Waititi.

For more information, images or to set up an interview with one of the 2008 New Generation Award recipients, please contact:

Rebecca Kennedy – 027 407 0533, email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or
Simon Bowden – 021 746 706

PROFILES OF 2008 RECIPIENTS

Jeff Henderson
Music Maker

Jeff Henderson is a Wellington based musician and an integral part of the New Zealand improvised music scene. Committed to alternative music and venues, Jeff is a well-known solo improviser and multi-instrumentalist. A specialist on saxophones and clarinet, Jeff also plays guitar, banjo, piano, percussion, uses voice, and anything else that the music requires. 

Born in 1973, Jeff attended the Wellington Conservatorium of Music, graduating in 1992.  He has performed with such internationally renowned musicians as Steve Lacy, Mark Sanders, Tony Buck, William Parker, Han Bennink, Clifford Barbaro, Mike Nock, Jim Denley, Thomas Lehn, Johannes Bauer, Tetuzi Akiyama, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Pateras, Clayton Thomas, Anthony Donaldson, Gerard Crewdson, Richard Nunns, John Edwards and Kris Wanders.

Jeff has an extensive history as an accompanist and participant in, and composer for, live musical theatre and other collaborative works including numerous projects with Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell of Red Mole Theatre, Stephen Bain and Madeline MacNamara. He has been involved in music for film, including recipient of the Harriet Friedlander Residency, Florian Habicht’s documentary feature Rubbings from a Live Man and has also performed with Stroma, placing a foot in the contemporary/classical camp.  

He has received several major commissions, often for large ensembles and features on numerous recorded releases.  Jeff has performed at many major national and international festivals throughout Australia, Asia and Europe. He currently performs with Fertility Festival, The Melancholy Babes and Colin McCabre. He produces the Om the Space Festival, operates Happy performance venue and runs iiii records.

Jeff has also founded venues in Wellington that foster new and original music and performance; including at the Space in Newtown which changed to a central city location now known as Happy. 

Alex Monteith
New Media Artist
Alex Monteith is a new media artist and academic whose work incorporates sound, performance, photography, film, video, kinetic and network components, while her practice explores the politics, freedoms and limits of consumer technology.  Her large-scale works involve collaboration with specialists from outside the art-world including sheep-dog triallists and New Zealand racing motorcyclists.

Born in Belfast, Alex grew up in Northern Ireland before moving to New Zealand in the late 1980s. She majored in photography at Elam School of Fine Arts (Auckland) for her Bachelor of Fine Arts, in Intermedia and the time-based arts for her Master of Fine Arts, and researched experimental film, video and performance for her Doctorate in Fine Arts.

Since 2000 Alex has taught in a new media/timebased or sculptural context at tertiary level and she currently lectures at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.  Over this time she has also regularly exhibited in art galleries, and film festivals, and been on television and radio both nationally and internationally.

Described as one of New Zealand’s most prolific experimental filmmakers, Alex’s technically sophisticated installations have been shown in galleries throughout New Zealand, including the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Artspace, St Paul St Gallery, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Physics Room.

Her screen-based works have been programmed into new media shows, touring programmes and international film festivals including: Recontres Internationales, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Raindance film festival, London, and Multimedia Art Asia Pacific in Brisbane. Her work was included in Scratching the Surface: Experiments in New Zealand Animation after Len Lye, which toured venues including the Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Los Angeles Film Forum. Her work, The Definitive Quantifier, won a silver award for experimental animation at the Worldfest Houston 2000 and in 2004, Pause the Rising Tide, won the overall festival prize at the International Surrealist Film Festival in Connecticut, New York.

Her short films, of which there are many, owe something to Bunuel, the early Surrealist film-makers and to Len Lye, while at the same time engaging with the history of animation and the new possibilities offered by digital media. As well as making shorter experimental films, she has also produced a 90 minute experimental documentary in the film essay genre on the transitional period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Recent projects involve collaborative performance events for projections using multiple screens in public gallery spaces.
Alex is also a competitive surfer.  She was the Irish National Women’s champ in 2001, competed in both the New Zealand national circuit and the European championships in 2001, and the world championships in Durban in 2002.  Alex lives in Auckland.

Madeleine Pierard
Lyric Soprano
Originally from Napier, Madeleine comes from a large family of musicians.  She studied piano from an early age until attaining an ATCL, later turning to the voice as her instrument. Her vocal training began as a member of the New Zealand Youth Choir, Voices New Zealand and The Tudor Consort. 

Completing a Bachelor of Music (Honours, 1st Class) in performance, musicology and composition at Victoria University in Wellington, she then completed a Post Graduate Diploma with Distinction at the Royal College of Music and now studies with Lillian Watson at the Benjamin Britten International Opera School in London. She has been awarded a number of scholarships and a staggering array of awards, recently winning the prestigious Great Elm Vocal Award at the Wigmore Hall and the Les Azuriales Ozone Opera Competition on the Côte d’Azur in France.

Madeleine’s recent opera roles have received glowing reviews around London, especially as Meleagro in Atalanta during the London Handel Festival, ‘her voice rippling though the intricate settings with suppleness and purity of tone’ (The Independent, 28.4.08). Other recent opera roles include Gerechtigkeit (Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots) with the Classical Opera Company in London and Marzelline (Fidelio) with the Auckland Philharmonia and NBR New Zealand Opera. She has made numerous concert and oratorio appearances throughout New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Highlights include appearing as a guest in concert with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, with Jonathan Lemalu, and as soloist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on tour in China. In March 2008, Madeleine made a solo appearance for HRH Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey during the Commonwealth Day Observance.

Along with opera, Madeleine has a particular interest in performing contemporary works, premiering Symphony No. 2 by New Zealand composer Ross Harris with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. Madeleine has just completed two recordings with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, featuring works by Lyell Cresswell for voice and orchestra under the Naxos Label.

Jo Randerson
Writer/Actor
Jo Randerson is a unique theatre-maker with extensive experience in comedy, poetry, literature and theatre. 

Majoring in Theatre and Film at Victoria University, Jo became involved as a writer, director and performer through Victoria University of Wellington Student Union’s Drama Club, performing at Bats (Wellington) and appearing on TV doing stand-up comedy.  

Jo attended Victoria University’s Creative Writing Course and was awarded the Prize for Best Portfolio in 1996. With Trouble Theatre, she co-wrote The Girl Who Died, Black Monk, Mouth, The Lead Wait and Bleach which was part of the 1998 New Zealand Fringe Festival, the Edinburgh Festival and the Tramway Festival of site-specific theatre in Glasgow.

Her shows have won the Wellington Fringe Best Comedy (2001, 2002) and Most Original Concept (2006), the Melbourne Fringe Best Comedy (2003), and the Melbourne Comedy Festival Golden Gibbo Award (2004), and have toured independently internationally.

Her writing has been shortlisted for the IIML Prize (2006 and 2008), and earned her fellowships both nationally and abroad.  She was a Robert Burns Fellow 2001 (Dunedin), a Winston Churchill Fellow 2003 (Russia) and held a Creative New Zealand/Department of Conservation Wild Creations Residency in 2002 at Cape Kidnappers.  Jo won the Bruce Mason Award in 1997 with her first play Fold and was a Billy T James Comedy Award Nominee in 2005.

Jo’s writing includes The Knot, (1998), The Spit Children, (2000) and The Keys to Hell (2004).  She has been involved in numerous joint works including participation in a project involving writers and physicists, resulting in the book Are Angels Okay? (2006).

Jo is founder of Barbarian Productions (an independent comic-theatre troupe).  She lives in Wellington with her partner Thomas La Hood and baby Geronimo.

Anna Sanderson
Writer
Anna Sanderson was born in 1970 on the North Shore of Auckland. She studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, majoring in photography. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Arts (majoring in English and Art History) from the University of Auckland.

She began work as a photographer for the National Library of New Zealand and worked on a photography-based visual practice. In 1995, as a response to the dearth of in-depth art criticism she, with Anna Miles and Tessa Laird, founded and co-edited the short lived but celebrated Monica magazine. It was here that she began to write a kind of journalistic art criticism.

In 1998 she left New Zealand and lived successively in Melbourne, Rotterdam and New York, developing, when not working for money, a writing practice which she describes as a mix of un-focused research and observational study.  While in New York she took two adult education classes at the New School University: First ‘Creative Non-fiction’ and then ‘Fiction’. These classes provided her with the opportunity to consider which her writing practice might be.

On a short visa-renewal trip to New Zealand from America in 2004, Anna met her now partner, and stayed. They had their first child in 2005, in the same year that Anna studied for a Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington with Damien Wilkins.  Integrating much of the material from the last few years the resulting manuscript, Brainpark, was a work of non-fiction which was published the following year by Victoria University Press.

Since then, Anna has been caring for two young children with her partner. In the background there have been the tentative beginnings of a new project and the occasional writing project, including an essay, Dr Yang, which received the Landfall essay prize in 2006.


NOTES TO EDITORS:

The New Generation Awards
The Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Awards celebrates early achievement and is an investment in the careers of each recipient. Biennially five artists are awarded $25,000 each, donated by Freemasons New Zealand.

Each artist must have developed an individual identity that demonstrates richness, range and depth, and stand for the strength and quality of their particular art form in New Zealand, at their level. They will be at an early stage of their career, but will have already demonstrated excellence and innovation through an output of artistic work at high levels.

The Awards are available to artists working in any discipline. The Arts Foundation, in partnership with the arts community, selects artists without them knowing that they are under consideration. Applications are not required for the New Generation Awards.

The Arts Foundation of New Zealand
The Arts Foundation of New Zealand is a charitable trust, independent from the Government, that invests in excellence in New Zealand arts.

The Foundation has an Endowment Fund, which generates income to support the arts. It encourages private individuals to support the endowment through donations and bequests. The endowment fund was originally set up through donations from the Lottery Grants Board and a three-year loan of $1 million from an anonymous patron.

www.artsfoundation.org.nz

Freemasons New Zealand
Freemasonry is a very old fraternal organization whose fundamental aims are to promote the higher ideals of life. They are concerned with human values, moral standards, the rights of the individual and a concern for all in need.

While being historically linked with science through the Royal Society, all Freemasons are urged to expand their interest in the arts. Famous Freemason artists include Mozart and Sibelius, Chagall and Hogarth, Voltaire, Kipling and Pope.

Freemasonry in New Zealand comprises almost 300 Lodges throughout the country. Its 11,000 members meet regularly to share in a special fellowship, which includes their families, and to help people through charity work and other community service.

www.freemasons.co.nz


Forsyth Barr
Principal Sponsor of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand
Presenting Sponsor of the Laureate Awards
Naming Rights Sponsor of the Forsyth Barr Laureates On-Stage

Forsyth Barr is proud to be a New Zealand firm. With a history spanning over 70 years, Forsyth Barr is one of the best known, most trusted and highly respected names in the New Zealand financial services industry.

Forsyth Barr offers services in sharebroking and company research, fixed interest, portfolio services, cash management, KiwiSaver, investment funds and leveraged equities.

With 14 offices nationwide and over 220 investment professionals, Forsyth Barr has the expertise and knowledge to assist people in their investment needs.

For more information about Forsyth Barr and how they can help people make the most of the investment opportunities in their lifetime visit www.forbar.co.nz or call 0800 367 227.