Image: Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Dunedin Public Art Gallery has opened 'And Then...', an exhibition in its Whānau Gallery that invites visitors to make their own stories from works in the collection. Running from 4 July to 29 November 2026, the show frames looking as an active, participatory act: each work is presented as a fragment of a larger narrative, and each visitor is encouraged to choose a path through the gallery.
The exhibition is built around the idea that meaning can emerge between artworks rather than inside a single image. According to the gallery, 'And Then...' asks viewers to move among pictures in sequence or in unexpected proximity, allowing new relationships to form through attention, memory and return. The curatorial text describes the display as one shaped by narrative possibilities, where images can suggest a beginning, a turning point or an ending depending on how they are encountered.
Drawing on fairy tale logic, mythic structure and choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, the exhibition brings together works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection by Saskia Leek, Norman Rockwell, Nicola Jackson, Peter Peryer, Simon Denny and Walter Crane, among others. The selection is said to include paintings, landscapes and illustrations of narrative scenes, with subjects that range from witches and Arabian Nights references to a castle escape and a wounded knight returning to a church door.
The gallery’s presentation positions storytelling as something visitors help complete. Cards illustrated with images drawn directly from the artworks can be used to extend the exhibition into the viewer’s hands, gathering traces of attention during a visit and then being arranged and rearranged to reveal new connections. The gallery says these cards are intended to support the experience by making narrative construction tactile as well as visual.
'Doing' the exhibition, in this sense, becomes part of the artwork’s meaning. The text on the gallery page describes looking as a kind of making, in which viewers interpret, select and imagine. It also links the exhibition’s approach to the ways people read and write, suggesting that visual art can develop narrative thinking through images as well as text. The result is a show structured less like a fixed sequence and more like a set of prompts for assembly and reassembly.
Among the works listed on the exhibition page are Nicola Jackson’s 'When Mr Donovan was thirteen' (1986), Simon Denny’s 'Ascent Hero Portrait Projection (Seer Krea)' (2017), Saskia Leek’s 'Summertime 1 (Bicycle)' (1999), Walter Crane’s 'The Witch Malebodea' (1899), Henry Ninham’s 'Castle Gate' from the mid-19th century, John D. Batten’s 'Zobeide and the Winged Serpents (from ‘Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights’, edited by E. Dixon)' (1893), Yamada Hojitsu’s 'Gekishusen no ebisu to Daikoku (Ebisu God and Daikoku God on a boat)' from the mid-19th century, Andrew Nicholl’s 'Fingal’s Cave, Staffa, Hebrides' circa 1858-68, and Albert Goodwin’s 'The Homecoming' (1914).
The exhibition is presented in the Whānau Gallery at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and runs until 29 November 2026.
