Lemon Hill Gallery in Wairewa is reopening after a three month summer break for its fifth year of operation.
There are eight exhibitions booked for 2025; the first of which is A Taste of Timber by Bernie Rossi, which opens on Sunday, March 2.
A Taste of Timber is a celebration of fine timber and fine woodwork.
Bernie’s work will showcase timber’s many facets: its beauty, its versatility and its functionality – and interestingly, its feel.
He will encourage people to handle many of the pieces in order to feel the wood itself and to see what the pieces will do.
On show will be furniture, jewellery boxes, games, puzzles and much more, all displaying fine and imaginative workmanship. A delight to behold.
He hopes his work will result in “deep and varied” conversations in the viewers – a rather unusual and a highly desirable goal for an art show.
Bernie’s working background is “varied.”
He says he “was never still for long”.
In the Air Force he worked with the Roulettes.
Then he owned a business, worked in the public service, and managed a call centre and IT, a construction company and a trucking company.
Outside this working life however, woodwork became “his escape and his relaxation”.
He began working with wood in his 20s to make furniture but moved from functional to creative woodwork and found the freedom to explore, experiment and be playful.
This lovely exhibition is the result.
He has sold work on commission: his work is regularly on display at the Orbost Art Centre where he was given a “highly commended” award in the 2023 Woodwork Exhibition.
Bernie is talented in other directions as well.
He says he has a “love affair with writing” but that “if writing is his love, then music is his mistress.”
He has had several short stories and poems published, has written five novels and published two of them – and he taught himself to play the sax, which he has played at all Lemon Hill Gallery openings for four years.
He gets paid for this in the gallery’s lemon slices, which shows just how priceless the lemon slices at the gallery are.
All are welcome.
