Atipico x Julia Holderness

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 or a piece of their choosing 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.

Julia Holderness - Botanical Correspondents

It was lovely to collaborate with Julia Holderness again, having previously paired a wine with her work Aster.

This time, Julia returns with Botanical Correspondents, an exhibition inspired by Emily Cumming Harris (1837–1925), one of Aotearoa's first professional women artists. Emily spent much of her life documenting New Zealand's native flora, producing hundreds of beautiful botanical paintings from her studio in Nelson.

A century after Emily's death, Julia revisits her work, gathering, layering and reinterpreting her imagery through a contemporary lens. It's a conversation between two women artists, separated by time but connected through their fascination with the natural world.

Cameo

For our pairing, Julia chose Cameo, a delicate painting of Campbell Island plants and flowers, based on one of Emily Harris's botanical images.

Set against a deep navy background, the tiny oval painting borrows its shape from a Victorian cameo, giving it a beautiful sense of history and romance.

But behind this delicate appearance is a rather wild story. Campbell Island is one of Aotearoa's most remote and exposed environments, home to extraordinary subantarctic megaherbs that flourish despite the harsh conditions.

Julia described the work as "restrained elegance and beauty in hard times", which really stayed with me. These remarkable plants thrive in a rugged landscape, yet here they are, captured within such a delicate and elegant form.

 Atipico Rapaura Syrah

To echo this contrast, I've chosen Atipico Rapaura Syrah, from El Grouso, a tiny one-acre certified organic vineyard in Marlborough.

The wine is beautifully floral and lifted, with lavender, violets and freshly cracked white pepper over darker notes of blueberry, liquorice and graphite. There's a lovely freshness to it, but also an edginess. Atipico describes it as "wild-yet-refined", which feels particularly fitting.

There's another botanical connection I love. The vineyard is dotted with large pepper trees, while the wine itself carries that distinctive peppery character. Handpicked by friends and family, the Syrah was fermented whole-cluster under a plum tree beside the vineyard, allowing the surrounding environment and season to play their part.

Knowing all this, there's a sense of wildness held within elegance... and it shows in the glass.

The wine has an edginess to it; it tastes wild, yet refined. It feels particularly fitting alongside Julia's work, where the megaherbs of Campbell Island flourish in a wild and exposed landscape before being brought into the beautiful, restrained form of her painting.

Enjoy!

- Renée Dale

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Julia Holderness
Botanical Correspondents

26 August - 14 September 2026

Julia Holderness presents her solo exhibition, Botanical Correspondents, developed for Rokowhiria Ashburton Art Gallery and exhibited earlier in 2026 as part of her Zonta Ashburton Women’s Art Awards Premier Award 2025.

 In Botanical Correspondents, Holderness' research considers and responds to the work of Emily Harris, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s first professional woman artists.  Emily Cumming Harris (1837-1925) is best-known for painting the indigenous flora of Aotearoa, producing hundreds of artworks in her studio in Whakatū Nelson. One hundred years after her death, her remarkable paintings continue to captivate audiences and invite them to contemplate the beauty of the natural world. In this exhibition Holderness responds creatively to her life, work and artistic practices.

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Read more here.

Amoise x Julia Holderness

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.

Julia Holderness

Julia Holderness sits at the intersection of art, history, and imagination. Through sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, and installation, she explores the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to create, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Her work invites us to reconsider how memory, archives, and everyday objects shape our understanding of the past, revealing that history is often as much an act of interpretation as it is of preservation.

Aster

Julia described her hero piece Aster, as:

“reassuringly domestic but quietly radical in its reclaiming of craft and feminine creativity".

The wine I’ve chosen reflects that tenderness: textural and comforting, with a nostalgic warmth and nurturing feeling. It’s a wine that feels familiar and homely, much like Aster itself… a reminder that the simplest memories often hold the deepest emotional weight.

Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024

I immediately thought of the Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024 - a wine that feels equally familiar yet quietly radical in its craft. Chenin Blanc is a wine that is synonymous with apple skin.  There’s something deeply domestic and familiar about its flavour. Could there be anything more nostalgic than helping mum to peel granny smiths for an apple stew, and nibbling on the skins? Simple moments that carry both nostalgia and warmth.

Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024 is a wine that carries a sense familiarity. There is something warm, domestic, and deeply human about it. Chenin Blanc is synonymous with apple skin: that simple, nostalgic flavour of helping nana peel Granny Smiths for a stew, nibbling the curls of green as if it was a daughter’s quiet duty. It’s humble, textural, and full of memory.

Amoise embraces that same honest craft. Foot-crushed fruit, a vineyard-born pied de cuve starter, and a low-intervention approach give the wine a gentle texture that mirrors the hand-made world Julia creates.

Winemaker Amy Farnsworth works with a kind of radical sensitivity herself: minimal sulphites, natural ferment, and techniques that can be risky if mishandled yet in her hands, they become quietly brilliant.

Like ‘Aster’, the wine feels both familiar and inventive, rooted in tradition yet confidently its own.

- Renée Dale

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JULIA HOLDERNESS The Room at Ashenby

11th Nov - 7th Dec 2025
Opening - Thursday 13th November, 5.30-6.30pm

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition The Room at Ashenby, featuring a new body of works by Julia Holderness.

In her latest exhibition at Sanderson, Holderness presents a collection of new ceramics alongside selected watercolours from her studio archive — a space hovering between memory and invention. The scene feels familiar yet faintly out of time, like a quiet corner from Monk’s House or Charleston; filled with vessels, books, painted furniture, and soft afternoon light. Decoration of the vases and hand-painted tiles becomes both reverie and research — a way of thinking through pattern, colour, and form. In their company, The Room at Ashenby becomes a site for imagination and memory: to settle, rearrange itself, and set out again.

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Read more here.