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Kirsten Sutherland: Sanctuary
September 26, 2025 @ 10:00 am – October 19, 2025 @ 4:00 pm
Kirsten Sutherland: Sanctuary
26 September – 19 October 2025
DEPOT 3 Vic Road
3 Victoria Road, Devonport
Exhibition Opening & Artist Talk:
Friday 26 September, 6-7:30pm
Artwork: Kirsten Sutherland, Arcadia.
About the Exhibition
Embroidery and textile motifs have been used universally as a visual code. In these embroideries, Kirsten Sutherland explores the language of nineteenth-century American quilt designs. Quilts with these designs, including the tumbling blocks and drunkard’s path motifs, were displayed in the windows of the Underground Railway, revealing coded instructions to guide escaped slaves to safety. The idea that textiles can hold protective power builds on previous work investigating saintly relics and hex signs. In the same way, the protective symbolism of the quilting designs brings a sense of sanctuary into the home.
These embroideries also investigate the intersection of traditional textile designs and modernist art, referencing artists such as Hilma af Klint, Anni Albers and Herman Miller.
About the Artist
Kirsten Sutherland is an embroidery artist whose practice explores how textiles and symbolism combine to create objects with talismanic and protective qualities. Her lifelong connection to embroidery began in Dunedin, where she learned the craft from her grandmother and pursued it as a school subject. She went on to study Textile Design at Wellington Polytechnic/Victoria University and later completed a Master’s in Design, specialising in digital embroidery. Alongside her own practice, she has lectured in embroidery and textile design at Massey University.
Sutherland has contributed her expertise to film and television, including serving as the digital embroiderer for the costumes in The Hobbit trilogy. She has exhibited throughout Aotearoa, with solo exhibitions at Pātaka Art + Museum and other galleries, and her work is represented in the collection of Te Papa Tongarewa.
Her early exhibitions reflected her Celtic and Catholic heritage, featuring protective Madonnas and explorations of saintly relics and stitched icons. Later projects referenced Hex signs, used to invite good fortune and ward off malevolent forces. Her ongoing practice continues to explore traditions of protective symbolism in embroidery, while questioning the assumption that textile art derives value only through painstaking handwork.
