Wayne Youle negotiates the in-between at the Dowse

Saturday, 13 June 2026

Back in Five is a mid-career survey at the Dowse Art Museum of Wayne Youle’s work, which forms a circular question about politics, family and the art world, writes Thomasin Sleigh.

Wayne Youle waits for you at the entrance to his show at the Dowse. A sculpture of his Converse sneakers and his ankles appears uncannily underneath a circular human-height shower curtain.

What’s behind here? you might wonder, as you stand in front of the opaque curtain. The artist? Nothing? A strange body? A mannequin?

The title of the show, Back in Five, also suggests Youle’s imminent return to the gallery. He hovers in this title and in this sculpture. Is he eager to see what you think of his show? Or does he call attention to his absence because he wants you to draw your own conclusions? This in-betweenness ricochets around Back in Five.

It’s a mid-career survey of Youle’s work, the genre of exhibition that can be an opportunity to assert a position, a chance to put a stake in the ground, but Youle’s work is, collectively, a clever feint, less a stake in the ground, more a continuous ball of knitting, a circular question about politics, family and the structural conventions of the art world.

Take Of Similar or Equal Weight, for example: a large white punching bag with a troubling golliwog-style face, hung from the ceiling by a black rope that is also attached to a small globe with a simple face sketched on it; the globe is beige, referencing white skin, European-ness.

Youle is of Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whakaeke, and Pākehā descent, so looks at Aotearoa New Zealand from two cultural perspectives. The faces of the two figures are cartoonish, silly almost, but the taut rope that harnesses the two faces to each other could be read as the tightrope of post-colonial Aotearoa; the dominance of Pākehā culture has centrifugal, outsized pull.

The next gallery is bisected by a door connected to a set of windows, as if the side has been taken off a building. This work is connected to Youle’s time as artist in residence at the McCahon House in 2019. McCahon and his family lived in Titirangi in the 1950s, in a small house that is now a museum. Famously, the four McCahon kids slept in bunks in a space underneath the house with no exterior wall; apparently in winter they tacked up a blanket to keep out the rain. Grim!

Youle’s work, cheekily titled The Nurturer, is the door and windows that the four kids lacked. This is an act of care that points to the relationship between domestic necessity and art making; a work that shows how art is made from within and around families – families that demand and inspire and contribute and entangle themselves.

Back in Five is filled with references to Youle’s whānau: How long a piece of string actually is is a partly rolled up, day-glo-orange knitted scarf. Youle asked his mother to knit for a year and see where she got to. This is it. The knitting is a marker of time passing, each stitch a physical representation of a moment in that year, but it’s also a line of day-glo connection between mother and son.

Though Youle abdicated responsibility for the making of this work, he carefully selected the colour and its installation feels highly curated and purposefully placed: a long section of the knitting runs exactly along the edge of the gallery, before it curls up into a tight, neat ball.

Though Back in Five leans into uncertainty, into its in-between state, this conceptual position is counterpointed by Youle’s aesthetic precision. Across all his varied materials, surfaces are always smooth. Edges are neat. Colour palettes are ruthlessly edited. Everything is, pleasingly, just so.

This highly finished aesthetic is put to powerful effect in the side-by-side sculptures The Long Sleeper and Grill, both from 2018. The sculptures’ potency lies in the meticulous arrangement of their parts: a glossy piece of wood languishes on a bed of cinder blocks, the wood’s “head” is gently placed on a pillow. On the wall alongside, the grill is a window, or a board game, or some kind of useless decoration.

Everything is on the ground, so you look down on this wood person; they are subservient to you. There are wooden protrusions that seem to signify a nose and a phallus. Something about this sculpture is immeasurably sad but I can’t quite explain why. Perhaps because this masculine figure is trapped, imprisoned, he stares at the ceiling, he has all the time in the world and nothing’s doing.

Youle rescued this piece of wood from the Canterbury Police Station after the Christchurch earthquakes. It’s a long way from a pile of earthquake rubble to the devastating melancholy of The Long Sleeper, but I’m glad we have artists such as Youle to take us on that journey.