Niki HASTINGS-MCFALL
(Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Gallery 1 (front)

Niki Hastings-McFall transforms mass-produced items of consumer culture into delicate, colourful and strangely quirky works. Scouring bargain stores all over Auckland, Hastings-McFall visualises and invents new histories for abundant consumer items. Materials that are synonymous with her artistic practice include various types of plastic flowers, clear plastic soya sauce fish, nylon thread, and any other small unit items she can source.

Combining her training in gold and silver-smithing and her interest in the stuff of everyday life Hastings-McFall manipulates these objects through repetition and proliferation. Turning the unnoticed discardable by-products of consumer culture into symbolic, culturally loaded objects, she draws on her Samoan/European background. For Natural Selection Hastings-McFall presents a work from her Polynising series. Covering a 1950’s table and chair setting with multicoloured plastic lei flowers sourced from $2 stores, she abandons the functionality of the furniture to re-contextualise the objects with a humorous Pacific skew.