WOW Exhibitions

After a year and a half of planning, designing and creating, World of WearableArt™ is delighted to announce an exciting New Zealand touring exhibition.

Experiencing garments in an exhibition environment is an opportunity to admire their incredible detail and intricacy up close and also to hear the extraordinary stories behind these mind-blowing works of art.     

These garments are part of the historic garment collection that is housed at the World of WearableArt™ & Classic Cars Museum, a visitor attraction open all year round in Nelson.

For the first time in well over a decade, WOW will take a selection of their very best garments on tour around New Zealand. This exciting exhibition called Off the Wall, designed by Wellington based exhibition designers 3D Creative has taken 18 months to plan and create.

Off the Wall opens at Canterbury Museum in December 2011 then travels to a range of New Zealand cities and centres.

Tour dates are tentatively set as follows:
Canterbury Museum, Christchurch:  2 December 2011 - 18 March 2012
Southland Museum, Invercargill:     7 April - 17 June 2012
Otago Museum, Dunedin:             30 June – 28 October 2012
Rotorua Museum:                        10 November 2012 - 10 February 2013
Waikato Museum, Hamilton:         April - July 2013
Te Manawa, Palmerston North:      31 August - 10 November 2013

Links to the CTV and Breakfast Broadcast:
Breakfast
CTV News Bulletin
CTV City Life

Currently the Off the Wall exhibition is at Canterbury Museum and we are running a fantastic competition where you can win tickets to The 2012 Brancott Estate World of WearableArt Awards Show.

View the image on the right for more details, to enter click here.

Garment Selectors

The Brancott Estate World of WearableArt plays a pivotal role in the creative education and inspiration of New Zealanders. It is a benchmark event that has set the highest of standards while being accessible to artists all over the world.

Those that participate in this event get to share their work alongside a phenomenal group of talented artists while displaying their own personal work on the world stage. It is all packaged into a world class night’s entertainment and performance.

Where some choose to draw on the most organic of techniques for their garments, most benefit from a technical exploration of the materials to compliment the categories brief and each year the audience gasps in amazement at the reinterpretation of common and available materials into the most abstract, comedic, beautiful and sublime wearable art form.

Arguably the greatest benefit from this incredible institution is the empowerment that young creatives gain from participating or simply observing the content within the show – here they can find a level of endorsement and encouragement that inspires a creative outflow of ideas to delight and amaze.

WOW also offers a stage from which creative employers can watch the world’s best and provides an avenue for them to approach the unique and innovative talent on display. We ourselves have met and hired a number of our senior and accomplished staff through our association with WOW and look forward each year to meeting this incredible community of artists.

Sir Richard Taylor
Weta Workshop

Design & Effects Supervisor,
Co-Director of the Weta Companies
Copyright Weta Workshop Ltd
Photo credit: Steve Unwin

So much of who we are and where we're from is presented in what we wear and how we wear it. Since the beginnings of human history our bodies and what we put on them has formed a central pillar of cultural tradition. We've painted and tattooed them, and dressed them with ceremony and ritual, usually as an expression of tribal cohesion and identity.

Today, our preoccupation with covering the body is dominated by the global fashion industry, which tends to encourage conformity and a preoccupation with branding. For most of us the clothes we wear must fit with what is fashionable, while being safe, flattering, comfortable and usually not too outrageous.

For me, the joy and energy of World of WearableArt™ is that it enables designers to step out from these constraints, and to see the body as a blank canvas on which they can develop any idea that appeals to them. The more provocative, unorthodox and original, the better. The garments do not have to be commercially viable. They do not even have to take themselves seriously. The only thing they must be is wearable. Creators have the freedom to use painting, sculpture, textiles, costuming, engineering and electronics – in fact any medium to realise their vision.  In Off the Wall you’ll see anything from 20,664 plastic collar stays to twelve leather suitcases, from recycled wool sacks to wood, corrugated iron to kitchen utensils or taxidermied birds to sumptuous silks.
WOW® is contemporary art that is both accessible and inclusive. The artists and designers come from all walks of life and many different backgrounds. Creating a WearableArt™ garment doesn't have to be an expensive process, and it encourages lateral and original thinking. It is also about being inventive with recycled materials or creating materials from scratch.
Even after 25 years of judging thousands of garments, I never tire of seeing the extent of creativity that WOW generates.  

The Off the Wall exhibition represents examples of the most extraordinary garments from our historic garment collection.  I urge you to go along and see Off the Wall  when it comes to a region near you so that you can experience up close the patience, the passion and the hours of dedication each individual work of art takes.   Seeing the garments up close is a truly inspiring experience and I have felt incredibly proud of the way they have been showcased in Off the Wall.    

Suzie Moncrieff
WOW Founder

Partnerships

Off the Wall has been made possible by the sponsorship of HP as the technology partner for the tour and Mainfreight as the transportation partner. 

Mainfreight is a New Zealand global transportation and logistics success story. As a proud New Zealand company, they have been supporting World of WearableArt™designers for almost a decade originally sponsoring the freight for New Zealand designers, which until then, had been a major barrier for designers entering the annual awards show. Ten years on Mainfreight’s support of designers from around the world has grown alongside their own global expansion. Now designers from Australia, United States, Hong Kong, China and the United Kingdom receive Mainfreight’s freighting support. And new for 2011 is their support of World of WearableArt’s exciting national touring exhibition Off the Wall. World of WearableArt™ and Mainfreight share a ‘can do’ business philosophy.

Education

An online education resource has also been developed by Techlink in conjunction with the Ministry of Education to support the tour featuring selected garments from the exhibition and highlighting stories of their creation.