The table is rarely just a table.

In this exhibition, Chloe Blades’ vivid, psychologically charged tablescapes sit alongside paintings and domestic artefacts drawn from the local Southland collections. Together, they trace the emotional architecture of women’s lives - the beauty on display and the labour quietly holding it in place.

Blades’ paintings are lush and theatrical: flowers arranged with intention, books paused mid-thought, wine glasses catching light somewhere between celebration and survival. At first glance, everything appears abundant and composed. Look longer and the composition starts to feel strategic. These are not simple still lifes. They are interiors of thought. They are portraits of mental load. They are scenes where care and exhaustion both sit down at once - and someone still has to clear the plates.

For generations, the domestic sphere has been framed as women’s territory: the place where things are made welcoming, smoothed over, remembered, decorated, nutritious and ‘ideally’ effortless. The objects gathered here reveal the choreography beneath that effort. The flowers rarely arrange themselves.

Blades’ practice carries a quiet but deliberate political charge. By centring the domestic interior - historically dismissed as apolitical - she exposes it as a site of expectation, control, negotiation and resistance. The table becomes a place where culture is absorbed, where politics are discussed (or avoided), where gender roles are rehearsed, where power circulates quietly under the surface. Even the act of arrangement - what is shown, what is hidden - becomes political.

Across time, the domestic interior becomes a stage. Museum artefacts sit beside Blades’ contemporary works to show that this performance has a long history: hosting, tending, remembering birthdays, managing emotion, diffusing tension, arranging the vase while holding everything else together.

This exhibition asks not simply how things look, but what it takes to make them look that way.

Sometimes the flowers are celebration.
Sometimes they are deflection.
Sometimes they are proof of care.

And sometimes, rearranging them is the only thing you can control.