Hear insights from Jeweller Octavia Cook and Curator Jane Groufsky around our current exhibition Cook & Company – particularly on the private and public life of jewellery and the acts of commissioning and collecting.

Groufsky has written a text to accompany Octavia Cook’s major exhibition, which appears on a tear-off poster free to take when you visit the gallery.

The evening will also include a special announcement from the Blumhardt Foundation.

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Jane Groufsky is Curator Social History at Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira and a member of the Objectspace board. Her research returns to the way social history can be read through textiles and adornment, and what these crafts reveal about the attitudes and values of an era.

Octavia Cook, born in Auckland in 1978, is a jeweller based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. To date Cook’s interest in her craft has spanned the traditional forms, settings and materials of jewellery, as well as its packaging, marketing and provenance. Special attention has been reserved for the value and social function of personal adornment.

Cook’s work is represented in public and private collections in Aotearoa and overseas including those of Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, the Dowse Art Museum, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Otago Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), MIMA Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (UK) and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (USA).