Closing the Circle - artist finds her way home | Taranaki News | Local News in Taranaki

SEPARATED from her mother at birth, Northland artist Heather Glen is closing a circle when she brings her exhibition to Stratford next month, the place where her mother raised her other four daughters.
Illusions Lies and Half-Truths is all about adoption and opens at the Percy Thomson Gallery July 16.
Heather’s grandparents raised ten children in New Plymouth and her mother later raised her family nearby. Had it been easier for women to keep their babies a generation or two back, she would have raised five daughters and Heather would have had a different name. Heather was instead adopted out under the then new 1955 Adoption Act. This act allowed for ‘stranger adoptions’, where neither the birth mother nor the adopting parents had any information about each other.
The Rt Hon Jonathan Hunt will be opening the show on Saturday, July 17, at 1.30pm. Hero to thousands involved in adoptions, it was Jonathan Hunt who proposed the 1985 Adult Adoption Information Act. 
This allowed adopted children like Heather and their birth families to access adoption records and trace each other. Heather is now happily reunited with her mother and sisters, and Taranaki has become a second home for her.
The opening event will also include a Panel Discussion on Adoption, with Jonathan Hunt, Marlene Corbett (CYFS Adoption Social Worker), Jan Winch-McCarty (Psychotherapist), and Murray Strong, who recently reunited with his birth family. The Panel will be chaired by Glen Wright (Social Researcher).
As well as a large body of paintings, the art show features a Wall of Memories, an ever-growing collection of adoption stories, comments and photos submitted by the public. Anyone can contribute to the Wall of Memories both before and during the show.
Times have changed and this exhibition acknowledges the past and honours all those involved in adoption. Illusions Lies and Half-Truths runs from July 16 to August 8.

Artist plunders Art Deco Museum

Following a residency at the Ranfurly Art Deco Museum, Raumati Beach artist, Frances Jill Studd, has had a wealth of historical material to draw on for a series of work to be shown at the Percy Thomson Community Gallery from  July 13– August 1.
She has used the museum’s collections, which attract worldwide interest, as a starting point for an exhibition which includes painting, photography, drawing, collage, and knitted wool swimsuits.
Ranfurly was a centre for gold mining in the 19th Century and has a number of architecturally significant Art Deco buildings. It celebrates this heritage in a festival at the end of February each year.
Studd is a graduate from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Canterbury and has been exhibiting her work since the early 1980s.
She has exhibited widely in New Zealand where she began making her art from found images, using mixed-media collage that combined historical and cultural imagery.
Exhibiting at the Whanganui Museum in 1990, she was noted as one of the first NZ artists to show her work within a museum environment and this interest in museums and their culture, continues in this new exhibition.