Kerrie Hughes b. 1959
Kerrie Hughes (b. 1959, Lower Hutt) is a New Zealand artist whose painting practice draws on her background in fashion, textiles and tapestry. She studied Clothing and Textiles at Wellington Polytechnic in the late 1970s before completing a Master’s in Fashion at St Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1988.
Hughes established fashion labels in New Zealand before moving to London, where, in 1990, she founded Idol with fellow New Zealander Penny Meachin. The label was stocked by major retailers in Europe and the United States, including Liberty, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks and Nordstrom, and its garments were featured in Vogue, Tatler and Elle. Her fashion work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa and the Dowse Art Museum.
Her transition to painting grew from an interest in historic tapestry encountered while living in Britain. Following an exhibition at Pātaka Art + Museum with milliner Liza Foreman, for which Hughes painted the verdure-tapestry backdrops, she began developing the large-scale landscape paintings that have become central to her practice. She held her first exhibition with Bowen Galleries in 2014.
Hughes’s paintings are characterised by dense foliage, complex vegetation and nature motifs, often painted in acrylic on loose hessian. Drawing on the visual language of verdure tapestry, she constructs immersive landscapes populated by animals and human figures. Her recent series explore ideas of belonging, identity, nature and the boundaries between the human and non-human worlds.
