‘Isabella Loudon is the new Tylee Cottage resident’
Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery is pleased to welcome sculptor and installation artist Isabella Loudon as the artist in residence at Tylee Cottage. Loudon. Loudon’s residency period is from 5 July to 30 November 2025, developing a new body of work which will be exhibited at Te Whare o Rehua in December 2025. The Tylee Cottage residency programme is generously supported by Creative New Zealand.
Known for her physically resonant and materially rich installations, Loudon’s practice explores the intersection between architecture, geology, the body, and the act of making. Using concrete, metal, fabric and salvaged materials, her works are characterised by their raw surfaces and sculptural intensity—environments that speak to labour, impermanence, and elemental transformation.
Greg Donson, Senior Curator & Programmes Manager says “After working with Loudon on her site-specific project - ‘two years, one building’ in December 2023, where she infiltrated all the spaces of a derelict building in Marton, we’re excited to see how a focused period of time as artist-in-residence at Tylee Cottage will enable her to create a site-specific project within the heritage gallery. Her practice crosses the terrain of drawing, sculpture and installation and has a strong residue of her own physicality as a maker, but she’s also acutely aware of how viewers navigate and interact with her works in a space. Loudon’s innovative use of unwanted and unexpected materials makes for work that’s poetic and gritty all at once.
Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Loudon is a rising voice in contemporary Aotearoa art and has previously exhibited at City Gallery Wellington, The Dowse Art Museum, and Sumer Gallery. Her time in Whanganui will allow for a period of immersion and experimentation as she engages with the local environment, architecture and history.
Isabella Loudon says she is “looking forward to returning to Whanganui, a place that holds many childhood memories and rediscovering it as an adult. Being around the corner from the Sarjeant will be great as I work towards developing an exhibition for the gallery. When forming site-responsive shows I need to spend time observing the atmosphere of a place and how people engage with and within the space. During this process I look forward to playing with new materials and ideas while also revisiting and reinventing past ones.”
Tylee Cottage
Tylee Cottage was built in 1853 and is one of Whanganui’s oldest homes. It is named after Thomas Tylee, a Whanganui pioneer who was in charge of the commissariat for the 65th Regiment. The cottage was originally situated in Wilson Street, Whanganui before being moved to its present location in 1982 and restored.
The first Tylee Cottage artist in residence was photographer Laurence Aberhart who moved in to Tylee in January 1986. Since then, over seventy artists have been Tylee residents, with many choosing to settle permanently in Whanganui afterwards.
Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery
The Sarjeant Gallery was founded through the generosity of Henry Sarjeant who in 1912 left a large sum of money – the equivalent of over $70 million in today’s terms – to establish the gallery “as a means of inspiration for ourselves and those who come after us”. The Sarjeant Gallery opened in 1919 and is recognised as one of the country’s most important heritage buildings. The Sarjeant Collection has become one of national significance and numbers over 8500 works of New Zealand and international art, spanning 400 years.
Closed for a decade and under redevelopment since 2019 Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery has now been fully earthquake strengthened, restored and extended with the addition of a new wing named Te Pātaka o Tā Te Archie John Taiaroa.
Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery reopened to the public in 2024. For more information please see sarjeant.org.nz
‘Two Years/One Building’
Rangitīkei District Monitor, November 2023
For the last couple of years Marton residents have been wondering what’s going on at 214 Broadway. There’s obviously been activity in the building (best known previously as Wally’s Bookshop) and recently, a group of strange black hanging objects have appeared in the front window.
All will be revealed on 8, 9 and 10 December, as sculptor Isabella Loudon opens the building to the public for her Two Years/One Building show.
In 2021 Isabella came home to Marton to recover from illness and, as she got back on her feet, she started looking round for somewhere to work. Her parents, Simon Loudon and Felicity Wallace, offered her space in their building, which is due to be demolished early next year. It wasn’t long before Isabella started expanding from the main downstairs studio into other spaces in the building. She says it’s been an amazing experience to have a whole building to experiment with. She’s been able to build things into various spaces (upstairs & down) and she doesn’t have to worry about cleaning up.
Isabella is this year’s recipient of the prestigious Olivia Spencer Bower award, which gives artists a year’s income and studio space in Christchurch to work in.
“I didn’t go to Christchurch,” she says. “I couldn’t find (suitable) studio space; I would’ve had to take a lot of stuff with me and I wouldn’t have had time to get much work done.” Instead she decided to stay in Marton; a place where “if I say I need some fencing wire, fencing wire turns up at my house”.
Sarjeant Gallery is supporting the open studio event with promotion and organising shuttle buses from Whanganui. Isabella will be giving artist talks at 11.15am and 2.15pm on Saturday and Sunday (9 and 10 December) and will be in the building and happy to talk with people at other times. The building is open 8-10 December from 11am to 4pm on all three days. Entry is free. Because it’s an old building, there’s only a staircase to access its top floor.
‘Artist has space, but for limited time only’
A building set for demolition will first form part of an “unsettling, immersive” sculptural exhibition by Marton artist Isabella Loudon.
Loudon has been working on the building for two years and will open it to the public from December 8–10.
The artist, who returned home to her family in Marton in 2021 to recover from glandular fever, made the most of her access to a studio space in a vacant commercial building owned by her parents.
Since then, the building has become a giant project, with each of the rooms offering her an opportunity to work with each other and the architecture.
In Wellington, Loudon's studio was a windowless basement studio where she could easily hide, absorbed in her own world. In the Marton building, with a large streetfront window, there’s been a lot of curiosity about what’s going on.
Sarjeant Gallery director Andrew Clifford said the exhibition would be worth travelling for. "Loudon's studio is an unsettling immersive experience – open for a tiny window in space and time before disappearing forever," he said.
The Sarjeant's curator and public programmes manager, Greg Donson, said: “There is a beautiful dance of formalism and disorder in Isabella's practice.
"What I have enjoyed about visiting the building twice this year has been how it is difficult to see where the building's spaces and her work end. They exist in quite a symbiotic way," Donson said.
Loudon is a fine arts graduate of Massey University and since 2016 has been included in large group shows in Wellington at the Dowse Art Museum, Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi and City Gallery Te Whare Toi.
Her primary medium has been concrete but, over the past two years, she has branched out into plaster, copper and discarded rubber inner tubes from cars, trucks, tractors and bikes.
For Loudon, the space a work occupies is often integral to how it is read. She makes the comparison to how her drawings occupy the space of a page.
She liked to keep things tidy and organised in the studio but the instinctive way she works led to a certain kind of chaos.
THE DETAILS
WHAT: Loudon’s studio is in Marton, about 30 minutes from Whanganui. Visitors will be able to view the spaces upstairs and downstairs. Works occupy the walls, floors and the ceiling. There is no wheelchair access to the upper floor. Loudon and Sarjeant Gallery staff will be present over the three days.
ARTIST TALK: Loudon will be in the space for the duration of the three days but will give an artist talk in conversation with a member of the Gallery's curatorial team on Saturday and Sunday at 11.15am and 2.15pm.
WHERE AND WHEN: 214 Broadway, Marton; Friday December 8, Saturday December 9 and Sunday December 10 from 11am to 4pm.
TRANSPORT: Visitors are free to make their own way to Marton, or the Sarjeant is offering a minivan shuttle service on Saturday and Sunday for $10 return. Departing for Marton from 38 Taupõ Quay 10.30am and 2pm. Returning to Whanganui from 214 Broadway 12.30pm and 3.30pm.
Regional Wrap: Marton building turns into an ‘unsettling immersive’ sculpture
In 2021 artist Isabella Loudon returned to her family home in the town of Marton Tutaenui in the lower North Island to recover from glandular fever.
Loudon has since stayed on, making ther most of a vacant commercial building owned by her parents as studio space.
The building is due to be demolished, so she’s been busy turning it into one giant installation project to create what is being dubbed an “unsettling, immersive sculpture”.
It’s fitting for an artist known for her use of common industrial materials to explore more lyrical, fragile and fluid states of construction and physical being. She’s best known for her use of concrete, but has now branched into plaster, copper and discarded rubber inner tubes.
Loudon's project is pretty visible in Marton: as a former takeaway business the building has a large street-front window in the main street.
Loudon opens up her installation to the public, in partnership with Whanganui's Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua, Friday December 8 to Sunday December 10, 11am-4pm, at 214 Broadway, Marton.
Loudon is a fine arts graduate of Massey University and has exhibited at the Dowse Art Museum, Te Tuhi, Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi and City Gallery Te Whare Toi.
She joins Mark Amery on Culture 101 for our weekly regional wrap: introducing the cultural life of her hometown.
