Ahoy, reader! On November 9th 2017, a small, obscure red paperback called Tinderbox was published. It was about a woman who tried to rewrite Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 from the perspective of the female characters and failed. It was also about a woman who worked as a bookseller for doomed chain bookstore Borders (RIP) […]
Megan Dunn
96 posts
Things I Learned at Art School was released on August 24th, 2021, in lockdown. I’ve only recently managed to have a flurry of in-person events, including a reading at Unity Books Wellington on Thursday November 18th. I asked Harry Ricketts to intro me for good reasons revealed below. His speech, […]
MY PUBLISHER SAYS: From the writer who brought you Tinderbox, a book about a woman trying to write a book, comes Things I Learned at Art School, a memoir by a woman who has never kept a diary. Part memoir, part essay collection, Megan Dunn’s ingenious, moving, hilariously personal Things I Learned at […]
Another art writer once said to me: no one wants to be an art writer Megan. I laughed because for me it was true. Art writing has been an accidental vocation. I attended Elam School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1998 when I was in my early twenties. When […]
The Spinoff, March 21, 2019 On a Sunday afternoon I opened my laptop and sat in In Transit, the most ambitious and nimble exhibition on in the country right now. If the Doozers from Fraggle Rock got unlimited access to stainless steel pipes and a really good welder they might have made the current installation at […]
I am one of the speakers on this episode of a new Radio New Zealand podcast called Pop! Culture. The entire episode – Beach, Please! – focuses on mermaids in contemporary culture and includes many fascinating speakers on why mermaids are so appealing right now. You can hear me wax […]
New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press). ___ Are these dancers holy fools and if so what does that make us? Francis Upritchard first exhibited Dancers as part of her pavilion, Save Yourself, at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Three tables of handmade figures, including Dancers, were presented in […]
New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press). ___ Does this artwork deserve to be called a ‘wanker’? Well, it is nothing if not colourful. Four rows of crosses shake and shudder within their lattice boxes. The oil paint has a slapdash appeal, each stroke thick and lustrous as though it […]
Wellington Sculpture Trust, Four Plinths catalogue, 2018 ____ I’m on top of the world, the seagull thought. Beak turned toward the ocean, flanked by the museum, the seagull had little cause to wonder but which world? 2. The globes were running a bit behind, Ruth Watson told me over Skype. […]
Art News New Zealand, Spring 2018 ___ These are the facts: in 2017 artist Sriwhana Spong travelled to the ruins of Disibodenberg monastery in Germany. She had three days to film her new work. “I didn’t know what to expect but I quickly realised the site had become a […]
Art News New Zealand, 2018 ___ Chris Sharp is an American curator, who first studied French Literature and wanted to be a novelist. “What novel would you like to have written?” I asked when Sharp visited Wellington on Creative New Zealand’s Te Manu Ka Tau/Flying Friends programme. “Spanking the Maid […]
New Zealand Books, 2018 ___ Did you realise that artist Theo Schoon, best known for his modernist photographs of rippling mud pools, also performed Balinese dance? Have you heard of the Prague-born architect Imric Porsolt, once the art critic for the Auckland Star, his writing so biting and insightful that […]