Published to accompany and extend Kate Newby’s impressive full-gallery exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi: YES TOMORROW (20 February – 30 May 2021), this book features two photographic series produced and/or selected by the artist, interleaved with an essay by respected writer and curator Christina Barton. The first series, On the benefits of building, 2020–21, is a carefully choreographed selection of Newby’s disposable camera images taken from the moment she arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand to undertake the exhibition, through to her travels immediately in the wake of its opening. These give intimate insights into the artist’s sources and processes and provide glimpses of her works in production and during installation. In the second series, Newby arranges the installation photographs produced by the Gallery into a sequence that takes readers through her personal version of the exhibition. This is as much an artist’s book as a gallery publication, a document to be relished as an insight into the practice of a memorable contemporary artist.

Kate Newby was born in Auckland in 1979. She studied at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland (BFA, 2001; MFA, 2007; DocFA, 2015). She has shown her work in diverse locations including Melbourne, Mexico City, Brussels, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Toronto, Vienna, Villeurbanne, London, Portland, and Bristol. Significant recent solo projects include: A puzzling light and moving, Parts I–III, lumber room, Portland (2018-19); I can’t nail the days down, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2018), and I’m just a pile of leaves, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland (2011). Newby was selected for the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018 and the first Brussels Biennial in 2008. She has undertaken residencies in Germany, Australia, the US, Mexico and Canada, including Chinati Foundation (Marfa, 2012), Fogo Island (Newfoundland, 2012-3), and ISCP (NYC, 2012). She won the Walters Prize in 2012, and was recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2019. She has recently moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Floresville, Texas. She is represented by Michael Lett, Auckland; Fine Arts, Sydney; The Sunday Painter, London, and Cooper Cole, Toronto.

Christina Barton was Director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand between 2007 and 2023. She is a respected art historian, writer and curator who has a special interest in critical and contextual art practices from the 1960s to the present.