Colere x Katherine Throne

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.

Katherine Throne

Katherine Throne is a contemporary painter based in Wānaka whose work is deeply inspired by the resilience, energy and beauty of the natural world. Through her works she captures not simply the appearance of flowers and gardens, but the vitality they hold.

Her paintings immerse the viewer in a world where light, movement and texture become almost tangible, inviting us to feel the lavishness of petals, the friction of stems and the energy that exists within a flourishing garden.

The Swing of Things

When Katherine described her hero piece, The Swing of Things, she spoke of her garden in summer happiness, where an afternoon breeze moves through the flowers while birds and insects create a constant sense of motion. The painting isn't simply about a garden; it's about the feeling of being immersed within one. There is warmth, generosity and an effortless vitality that invites you to linger.

Beneath that joy sits the quiet philosophy of her exhibition, Labour of Love. Katherine speaks of reverence for nature and for those who tend it. The garden's beauty isn't accidental; it is cultivated through patience, observation and care. The Swing of Things feels like the reward for that devotion... a fleeting moment when everything is alive, flourishing and perfectly in balance.

Colere - Florette 2023

The wine immediately recalled the atmosphere of the painting for me. A blend of 60% Sauvignon Blanc and 40% Pinot Noir, Florette carries delicate floral aromatics, bright citrus and gentle summer berry fruit, all wrapped in a freshness that feels like a warm breeze moving through a garden.

Then there was the name; Florette, which evokes flowers blooming, quietly reinforcing Katherine's celebration of the garden and the beauty that comes from careful cultivation.

Knowing the vineyard is organically farmed adds another layer to the pairing. Like Katherine's garden, it is a place where biodiversity is welcomed, where insects, wildflowers and healthy soils all play their part. Both the painting and the wine celebrate the beauty that emerges when nature is given the space to flourish.

Together, the work and the wine celebrate nature in motion. Both remind us that beauty is rarely created in an instant, but through patience, care and quiet attention. They invite us to slow down, breathe deeply and savour the simple pleasure of a summer afternoon when everything feels wonderfully alive.

Enjoy!

- Renée Dale

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Katherine Throne
Labour of Love

24 June - 19 July 2026

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Labour of Love featuring a new suite of paintings by Katherine Throne.

 The suite of canvasses making up Labour of Love burst with botanical energy. Based on the garden that wraps around her studio, these paintings are a celebration of the garden that Wanaka-based Katherine Throne has nurtured from the thin soil in Otago. 

 Alongside their joyous optimism, these paintings have a definitive physicality. Like the plants she has lovingly coaxed outside, the work on display is the result of hard-won labour.  The act of creating is filled with trial, error, success and failure, and yet for Throne, the urge to create is constant. The intertwining of her labour both outside and in the studio are the subject of this exhibition.

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- Dr Penelope Jackson MNZM

Read more here.

Colere x Mickey Smith

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.

Mickey Smith

I first met Mickey Smith about two years ago at Sanderson.

Before we even started talking about art, I noticed her because she had an awesome hairstyle ... an undercut. I loved it immediately because I had one too! What started as a casual comment turned into a surprisingly emotional conversation about why we had both chosen to wear our hair that way, and the personal experiences sitting quietly underneath it.

I remember walking away from that interaction with Mickey thinking what a powerhouse. What a strong woman. What a thoughtful human. What a talent.

So when Lydia connected us again to pair a wine with Mickey’s latest exhibition, Sacrosanct, it genuinely felt like an honour. It felt less like simply matching a wine to an artwork, and more like two worlds thoughtfully coming together. It felt authentic and real, and tangible.

Untitled Vol. XII, Strahov

Mickey’s work explores books, archives, libraries, and the physical weight of cultural memory. For this exhibition, she photographed within Prague’s Strahov Monastery, creating images dense with texture, silence, and accumulated time. As Mickey described them, the works carry “big, gritty weight” and feel “tactile” and “dead quiet.”

When I first saw Untitled Vol. XII, Strahov, 2026, the shelves of aging books seemed to transform into something beyond objects ... part of the building itself, almost geological. The works appear musty and tactile, yet somehow preserved from decay, creating this beautiful tension between entropy and permanence.

Standing in the gallery discussing the work together, there was a shared feeling that this pairing needed to reward patience and contemplation rather than immediacy.

Colere - Ashmore Vineyard Pinot Noir 2020

As we discussed the work, I kept coming back to one wine ... Colere - Ashmore Vineyard Pinot Noir 2020

The wine immediately mirrored the emotional atmosphere of the piece for me. There were these autumnal, forest floor characters alongside notes that reminded me of old paper, tobacco, timber shelves, and bound leather. Emma Jenkins MW described the wine as showing “bacon fat, mocha and tobacco whole-bunch notes” alongside wild berries and pomegranate, with the 100% whole bunch fermentation adding “a little extra seasoning.”

Standing together at the gallery with the works hanging on the walls and a glass of the Colere in hand ... we all realised, this was the one.

Both the work and the wine asked for the same thing from us ... slowing down. Intention. Thoughtfulness. Time. Both unfolded through texture, detail, and emotional weight.

It was sacrosanct.

Enjoy.

- Renée Dale

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Mickey Smith
Sacrosanct

29 May - 21 June 2026

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Sacrosanct 

“To live means to leave traces.” - Walter Benjamin

Mickey Smith is deeply attentive to the fragility of knowledge systems, their inevitable decay and their survival. For more than two decades the American-born, Aotearoa-based artist has closely examined libraries in the US, New Zealand and the Pacific.

Now, with Sacrosanct, we see an evolution from Smith’s award-winning photographic series Volume. With this expansion on her decades-long inquiry into the physical and social significance of texts and archives, she turns her gaze to libraries cloistered in monasteries.

It is tempting to picture the artist as a young girl in 1970s Minnesota sitting among the stacks in her local library, her nose in a book. The truth is a little less tidy. Smith didn’t find herself in an academic environment until she entered university. Books, to her, were merely utilitarian. So, what drew her to a theological library in the English Midlands with 229 hand-transcribed Latin manuscripts dating back to the 12th century? 

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Read more here.