‘A child of the sun’ curators’ talk

Curating Katherine Mansfield’s last year

How do you represent the last year of New Zealand’s best-known writer through the objects she treasured and left to loved ones? Hear curatorial insights behind our latest exhibition ‘A child of the sun’: Katherine Mansfield’s last year with co-curators Dr Fiona Oliver and Cherie Jacobson (Director, Katherine Mansfield House & Garden).

Exploring a life and legacy

When Katherine Mansfield ecstatically proclaimed in her notebook that she wanted to be ‘a child of sun’, the tuberculosis that would kill her less than a year later was already well advanced. She knew she was dying but resisted the knowledge. Instead, through her reading of works influenced by Eastern mysticism, she experienced a radical transformation that had her imagining new ways to work and live.

The exhibition explores the last year of Katherine Mansfield's life and considers her legacy.

‘A child of the sun’: Katherine Mansfield’s last year

About the speakers

Dr Fiona Oliver is Exhibitions Advisor at the National Library of New Zealand.

Cherie Jacobson is the Director of Katherine Mansfield House & Garden, the Category I historic place that is now a museum celebrating Mansfield’s life and writing.