Showing for the first time, The Earl Street Journal is a major exhibition involving the ground and first floor gallery spaces.

It features major investment profile works by Robert Ellis, Ralph Hotere, W D Hammond, Ann Robinson and others. Recently inducted 2010 Arts Laureate, the great ceramist, John Parker has produced a large scale white still-life work (openly acknowledging his debt to Ernest Shufflebotham and Keith Murray). He also explores in a new group of works the distinct qualities of red and black glaze.

Megan Huffadine’s distinctive wall-mounted sculpted forms are imbued with thoughtful presence, spinning with implied meaning and possibilities. Karl Maughan’s increasingly abstract technique takes the viewer on a journey into the melodies of colour and the sensation of being in the garden. Wendy Fairclough explores tone, substance, hue and space between objects. Richard Orjis strips the extraneous away, revealing both the painted beauty and the sexual allure of orchids.

Emily Siddell combines repeated ceramic and glass forms into suspended lei’s. Galia Amsel’s Flare 2 plays with glass mass, surface treatment and a painterly investigation of colour flow and change. Neil Dawson’s Plate 6 uses shadow and the partial narrative sourced from the willow pattern plate, contrasting this with the architectural device of a crossed beam.

Ranamok Glass Prize winner Sue Hawker is represented by a directly comparable work of such marvellous complexity as to defy questions of how it was made.

The Earl Street Journal includes significant work by artists new to the gallery (Paul Martinson’s surreal combination of extinct birds and the female figure; Philip Kilmore’s remarkably detailed, beautiful, hydrangeas; and Nicholas Dillon’s compelling ornithological studies of keas, pied oystercatchers and tuis). There is a broad selection of fine works on paper by Nigel Brown, Grahame Sydney, Robin White and Penny Stotter. Key paintings by Neil Frazer, Bruce Hunt, Callum Arnold, Mike Petre and Elizabeth Rees.