Red Spot Gallery - Rotorua Art Gallery supporting local artists
Ron Hall
Ron Hall is a profesional artist based in Te Aroha, New Zealand. Many of Ron’s modern artworks are created from recycled beehives.
In 2009 Ron was a winner of two Tauranga National Art Awards and was premier winner of the Rotorua Art Awards judged by Jonathon Manewheoki from Te Papa.
Ron Hall has been an artist and art educator for the last twenty years. This award winning artist has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the North Island. Recent highlights of Hall’s career have included his gaining a Master of Fine Arts degree, being judged as overall winner by Barry Lett in the open section of the Molly-Morpeth Awards and the inclusion of his work in a public art collection. Hall is a full time artist presently involved with the moderation of Masters and Diploma students work in two tertiary institutions, and is a visiting tutor for the visual arts, Christchurch College of Education, New Zealand.
Ron Hall is most known for his formalist art assemblages containing beehive boxes, tea boxes and other industrial materials.
ABOUT THE ART
Ron Hall believes we underrate the cultural and aesthetic value of ordinary things—familiarity dulls our senses. His works of art involve the assemblage of discarded industrial materials sourced from the New Zealand cultural heartland, revealing particular aspects of who we are.
Emma-Louise Watson wrote in a recent catalogue, ‘Resited’ 2004, “ Hall has continued his art production of assemblages, constructed from discarded and found materials such as beehives, 5 lb kahikatea tea boxes and fence palings. These objects are invested with references to New Zealand’s cultural identity … while also drawing attention to the overlooked beauty which lies in weathered materials”.
Ron’s assemblages are stored, cut, arranged and joined in an engineering workshop in an industrial area of Rotorua. These art works are completed in this male dominated workplace which rings to the sound of hammering, crashing, and the cutting and welding of metals. It is a gloriously dirty place where highly structured objects are made. It is here, in the heart of the ‘big corrugated iron shed’ where he integrates the physical, cultural and conceptual elements of his art works.
These assemblages are a celebration of the unexpected beauty and cultural traces, found in discarded industrial waste. Barry Lett said about Hall’s work in the ‘Bay Weekender’ January 27th 2001, ‘It has a very contemporary sense of surface – a mix of rough and subtle, a mix of technological and down on the farm’.