This five part mobile, made from shaped duralumin (burnished aluminium) sheeting, was originally part of the Wellington College of Education Art Collection, and located at the Wellington Teachers’ Training College in Karori. The work was gifted by the Renaissance Singers of Wellington in 1971.

Sea Creatures was accessioned into Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection when the University acquired the Training College in 2009.

However, it remained in place in Karori until 2017, when it was exhibited at Adam Art Gallery. Subsequently Sea Creatures was reinstalled in Rutherford House on the University’s Pipitea campus in 2018, as the Karori Campus had been sold.

An information panel installed with the work reads:

“Sea Creatures is a hanging mobile of worked aluminium-copper alloy shapes that play with abstracted forms taken from nature to convey a sense of rhythm and movement. Whether swooping sea animals or waving tentacles of kelp, the associations this work arouses are based on the artist’s close connection to the sea, which she observes on a daily basis from her home in Island Bay, where she has lived since the 1960s. Soon after her arrival she wrote:

‘I have gained a great deal from New Zealand. It is beautiful, and where we live in Wellington the house overlooks the sea, and although previously I was always a little frightened of the sea, now I love it – it is very dramatic, the different moods and forms of the waves and sea birds. I don’t think I could live without it now.’”

See also:

• Sea Creatures (Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection, Adam Art Gallery website)

• Cameron Drawbridge, ‘Tanya Ashken: Jeweller, Silversmith, Sculptor’ (Cameron Drawbridge: 2016), pp105-106