Ockham NZ Book Award Winner 2025
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
"An academic tome on the expansiveness and diversity of women’s art practice in Aotearoa, Sight Lines is derived from author Kirsty Baker’s doctoral thesis, and complemented with essays from eight other contributors.
The book traverses many artforms and does a stellar job providing a vista through New Zealand art history across time, space and place. Liberally illustrated, with intentional, subtle design, Sight Lines will likely become a go-to text for tertiary art history students, and a point of reference within the country’s art analysis literature."
Extraordinary women, groundbreaking art. From ancient whatu kākahu to contemporary installation art, Frances Hodgkins to Merata Mita, Fiona Clark to Mataaho Collective, Sight Lines tells the story of art made by women in Aotearoa.
Gathered here are painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, weavers, textile artists, poets and activists. They have worked individually, collaboratively and in collectives. They have defied restrictive definitions of what art should be and what it can do. Their stories and their work enable us to ask new questions of art history in Aotearoa. How have tangata whenua and tangata tiriti artists negotiated their relationships to each other, and to this place? How have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land and water, family and community, politics and the nation?
With more than 150 striking images and essays by Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith and Megan Tamati-Quennell alongside the author, Sight Lines is a bold new account of art-making in Aotearoa through 35 extraordinary women artists.
SPECS: 23.5cm x 18.0cm