While maintaining individual practices, Gina Ferguson and Dale Cotton have been collaborating over the last 12 months.

Gina Ferguson

Gina Ferguson was born in Christchurch and currently resides in Auckland, New Zealand. She graduated with a BFA from Canterbury University in 1990, majoring in sculpture and an MFA from RMIT (Melbourne, Australia) in 1999. She is a practicing artist and full time tenured Senior Lecturer and Gallery One Curator in the Department of Design and Contemporary Arts at Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand. She has exhibited in both New Zealand and Australia. She has been a selected finalist in national art awards, exhibited in numerous major national sculpture trails and has work in collections within New Zealand.

Gina primarily works within the context of sculpture/installation and is also involved in a wider range of art and craft practices. She is interested in notions of the body, abjection, place, space, and experience. The implications surrounding our environment, uncertainty and resulting instability are primary discussions informing her art practice.

Installations are site responsive and often temporal; they typically involve audience participation enabling a deeper reading as the nature and surface of the work changes over time. Interactive and textural in form, her work draws upon the connotations that are evoked by materiality, site, and the senses (sound, touch, smell etc).

This experience instigates embodied memory when the viewer encounters the work, establishing an opportunity for contemplation regarding the environment and a discussion of self in relation to otherness as central to the precariousness of our place and time.

Key outdoor sculpture exhibitions
Sculpture in the Botanic Gardens, Auckland Botanical Gardens, Auckland, New Zealand, 2019/20
NZ Sculpture onShore, Fort Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand, 2018, 2016, 2014, 2012
Harbourview Sculpture Trail, Te Atatu Peninsula, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Headland: Sculpture on the Gulf, Waiheke Island, New Zealand, 2013, 2011
Shapeshifter, Civic Gardens, Wellington, New Zealand, 2012.

Dale Cotton

Dale Cotton was born in Christchurch and currently resides at Nine Mile Beach Te Tai Poutini, New Zealand. He graduated from the SAE Institute Sydney in 1992 with a Diploma in audio engineering, and from Otago University in 2018 with a Master in Music. He is a practicing artist and full-time media professional with many New Zealand music awards to his name.

Cotton works within the context of contemporary sound and light composition, electroacoustic art, data sonification/cultural analytics, production design and management. He began working seriously with media arts during a master's degree in analysis and electroacoustic composition.

His inspiration comes from the history of music and visual art as well as the immediate matter of the world around us, the way they behave, the way they are generated, and by systems and data and the traces that those systems and data reveal. These interests have lead his work into worlds of cutting-edge technologies, new media and sonification. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for the new art and the way it can touch and inform the viewer and listener.

Related key art works
Acousmatic works can be listened to here: https://soundcloud.com/d-cotton-aotearoa
Commercial works can be watched here: https://audioworkshop.tumblr.com

Related key New Zealand music awards
Best Pacific Language Album 2011, Best Folk Music Album 2005/2008 (twice)
Electronic Album of the Year 2003, Producer of the Year 1998/1999 (twice).