Thyme Hill Merlot x Kāryn Taylor

Each month, Boutique Connection supports Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.

This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.

I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.

The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.

Kāryn Taylor - Experimental Physics

Kāryn Taylor is a New Zealand artist whose work explores light, space and perception, often using geometry and movement to challenge what we think we see.

Her exhibition at Sanderson Contemporary invites us to question how we experience the physical world. Things that initially appear simple and familiar become a little less certain the longer we look. I rather like that idea, particularly when it comes to matching art with wine!

Experimental Physics

For our pairing, Kāryn suggested Experimental Physics, an installation she describes as a "multidimensional drawing".

Painted lines extend across the gallery wall and floor, connecting to a leaning rod that becomes part of the drawing itself. Balanced at its apex is an animation that continually moves and reconfigures itself.

There's something wonderfully intriguing about the work. It's both complex and minimalist, with strong geometric lines suggesting order and stability, while the movement introduces an element of uncertainty.

When I asked Kāryn what Experimental Physics might taste or feel like, her answer was simply "smooth liquorice".

Not quite what I was expecting! I had imagined something sharp, linear, perhaps even electric. But her answer introduced a darker, softer and more textural dimension to the work, and gave me a rather interesting starting point for the wine.

Thyme Hill Aroarokaehe Merlot 2023

Their Aroarokaehe Merlot 2023 is a wonderful example of why we shouldn't always judge a wine by its variety or region.

What's particularly surprising is how much this Merlot reminds me of Central Otago Pinot Noir. It has an elegance and familiar regional character that might have you questioning what was actually in your glass if you tasted it blind.

I shared three possible wines with Kāryn, each exploring a different aspect of her work, but it was the Thyme Hill Merlot that caught her attention. She loved the connection with "questioning the truth of perception and reality", which is really at the heart of Experimental Physics.

In the installation, we're presented with familiar lines and geometric forms, but movement and perspective challenge our understanding of what we're seeing. The Merlot plays a similar trick on our senses. We read Merlot on the label and already have an idea of what to expect. Yet in the glass, its character could easily lead us towards Pinot Noir.

And then there's Kāryn's smooth liquorice. Those darker fruit and herbal characters, together with the wine's silky texture, bring us back to her original description of the artwork.

Enjoy!

- Renée Dale

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Karyn Taylor
Experimental Physics
14 October - 8 November 2026

Our senses construct a shallow shoreline of perception, completely blind to the vast, quantum depths where reality builds its foundations. Our experience informs us that a table is solid, that a circle is perfectly round and that a sunset is beautiful, yet our access to reality is never entirely unmediated. In his allegory of the cave, Plato used the image of prisoners confined underground, able to see only shadows cast onto a wall, to explore the difference between appearance and reality and the limits of what we can know through our senses. Having never seen the objects that produce the shadows, the prisoners mistake them for reality itself. The allegory offers a powerful reminder that what we perceive may be only a partial account of what exists. At the quantum scale, matter behaves in ways that bear little resemblance to the solid, stable world we experience. There remains a persistent gap between what we know and what we can perceive.

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Read more from Dina Jezdic here.

Wiese Family Wines x Stephen Ellis

Each month, Boutique Connection sponsors Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.

This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.

I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.

The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.

Stephen Ellis

Stephen Ellis’ drawings are monochromatic, technically masterful, yet warm and nostalgic. Every object feels carefully considered, every shadow purposeful. Rather than simply depicting a scene, Stephen creates spaces filled with memory, where familiar objects invite us to reflect on the stories they carry.

For this exhibition, Undertow, Stephen continues exploring ideas of place, nostalgia, and the subtle pull of memory. They ask us to spend time looking, discovering small details that might otherwise be overlooked.

Red Boy St Clair

Stephen describes the work as "a very nostalgic piece... based on the composition of Thomas Lawrence's portrait The Red Boy or Master Charles Lambton (1825)." That connection between past and present became the starting point for the pairing.

Although the work is rendered almost entirely in lamp black and subtle tones, it never feels heavy. The familiar objects become symbols rather than possessions, each one holding fragments of memory and place.

Wiese Family Wines Pinot Noir 2024

The wine comes from Wiese Family Wines in Central Otago... a young couple from two very different parts of the world... South Africa and Argentina... who fell in love with Pinot Noir in Sonoma before eventually finding home in Central Otago.

This Pinot Noir was a surprise to me. Rather than the dark, brooding fruit often associated with Central Otago, it sits in a brighter register. Think red plum, raspberry and red peach skin, carried by fine tannins that give the wine shape without weight.

Then, just as the fruit begins to settle, another layer appears... a gravitas emerges with a savoury edge and a delicate saline finish that lingers.

Stephen's drawing gradually uncovers memories hidden within ordinary objects, while the Pinot slowly builds across the palate like a moody orchestral piece... gathering depth before reaching crescendo.

There's also a shared sense of nostalgia. Stephen looks back through art history and personal memory, while the Pinot feels familiar yet unpredictable.

Enjoy!

- Renée Dale

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Stephen Ellis
Undertow | Hvac

29th April - 24th May 2026

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Undertow | Hvac by Stephen Ellis.

 The exhibition features a continuation of the artist’s Undertow series, as well as showcasing the beginning of an exciting new series by the artist titled ‘Hvac’.

 During his 2025 residency at the Dunedin School of Art Ellis initiated the suite of drawings under the title - Undertow. The scenes in these drawings are set on Ōtepoti’s Saint Clair Beach, a formative coastal landscape from the artist’s childhood.

 The brooding skies depicted quote the work of of Colin McCahon, who like the artist was born in Ōtepoti and studied at the Dunedin School of Art.

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Read more here.