A Winton-born artist who first joined the Southland Museum as a child of about nine is helping its curators record the stories behind a lifetime of work.
Janice Gill has been gifting paintings to the regional museum on and off since about 1976. Larger donations in 2018 and 2023 added artworks, sketchbooks and even paintbrushes, and the archive now holds more than 400 objects spanning the 1960s to the present.
Invercargill City Council's museum and heritage services team, working with Te Unua Museum of Southland, has been sitting down with Gill to capture the context behind each piece and the people in them.
Collections team leader Tiffany Jenks said Gill's work, which focuses mainly on people and often carries a social comment on Southland and New Zealand life, offered a window on the region's culture.
"If you disconnect an item from its history, over time it simply becomes something old," Jenks said.
Winton faces, Southland stories
Among the notable works are The Face I Was Looking For Was Not There, which depicts the artist's father's funeral, and Bus Stop (Winton Post Office). Progress sketches for the latter include drawings of real Winton residents, exactly the kind of detail the team wants recorded while it can be.
Two new collections technicians, Jess Roylands and Yiying Yang, have helped with accessioning the works, logging each object's provenance, date, history, copyright, condition and location.
Framed pieces have been packed in conservation-grade materials and placed on art racks at Te Pātaka Taoka, the Southern Regional Collections Facility.
Back home after decades away
Gill spent much of her life near Nelson before returning to Southland three years ago. Her connection to the museum goes back to the mid-1950s, when her family paid a shilling for a junior membership after a fundraising appeal.
She said the people now working with the collection were around half her age, and their welcome had mattered.
"It's the people working with the museum who have very much made me feel at home," she said.
The relationship is not finished. A retrospective exhibition of Gill's work is planned for 2027, and she is painting a new series that will also be gifted to the collection.
The work is part of the wider preparation for Te Unua, the new museum under construction in Invercargill, where the region's collections will eventually return to public display.
