Private Research Owen Connors

Owen Connors presents a new body of drawings inspired by Janet Frame's 1962 novel ‘The Edge of the Alphabet’.

Connors reaches into the caches of language offered by Frame, aiming to visualise the aspirations and limitations that litter the experience of this text; ambition, fear, loneliness and pride. Situated within the traditions of Book Arts, the created artworks bring into purview elements of the characters’ lives and mindsets, over the course of a metaphysical literary voyage from a colony on the edges of an empire into the imagined embrace of an alien motherland. Dreams and freedoms become guarded and extinguished under the blight of an empire’s state of belonging.

Owen Connors is an artist and writer currently based in London. Born in Māwhera, Greymouth, they studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Colorado.

In 2023 they were the winner of the Rydal Art Prize  founded by Seeds Trust and Toi Tauranga Art Gallery, of which this exhibition follows, and a McCahon House artist in residence the same year. They were a finalist for the Auckland Art Gallery Walters Prize in 2024.

Recent exhibitions include, A sentence with a broken back, 2025, Robert Heald Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-tara; Land of doubts & shadows, 2024, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Tāmaki Makaurau; lolai, lullow; into vncuth world incommen so ertow, 2023, Robert Heald Gallery, and for the feral splendour, 2022, Physics Room, Ōtautahi.

Prize Partner: Seeds Trust