Ten Question Q&A with Chelsea Nichols and Aaron Lister

Q1: You work at different institutions. How, and when, did you discover that you were both so drawn to Jason Greig’s work and decide that you should collaborate on an exhibition?

Chelsea and Aaron: There was a really important moment for us during Occulture: The Dark Arts, an exhibition Aaron curated at City Gallery Wellington in 2017, which included Jason Greig’s extraordinary series Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Chelsea was in the audience when Aaron and Jason gave a raw and deeply personal conversation about the battle between light and dark that exists in all of us. Blame it on the occult atmosphere of the exhibition, but in that moment she had a strange premonition that one day the three of us would work together on something much bigger. She promptly marched up to Aaron after the talk and announced as much. The cheek of it! It took almost a decade for the stars — or perhaps the dark forces — to align. The exhibition was originally intended for City Gallery Wellington, but the closure of Civic Square meant it eventually found its home at The Dowse. In hindsight, that turned out to be a gift. The project became much richer because it was shaped by two institutions, two curators, and one shared obsession with Jason’s work. Looking back, it feels less like we chose this project than that it had been patiently waiting for the three of us to catch up.

Q2: The works came from far and wide. How hard was it to track it down and to persuade private owners to lend them?

During the exhibition we often joked that we pursued Jason’s works like Victor Frankenstein stalking his monster across the Arctic ice. In reality, it involved a lot of detective work followed by knocking on the doors of extraordinarily generous strangers up and down the country. Jason has one of the most remarkable communities of collectors quietly championing his work — from both within and beyond what you might think of as the art world. We eventually tracked down around nearly 900 works, managing to see a good many of them in person. We know there are still more out there, resisting our gaze. We were met with overwhelming support for this project by collectors willing to share their work. They understood this was a significant moment in Jason’s career — one they had been waiting for just as eagerly as we had.

Q3: The exhibition at The Dowse early on 2025 — Blood is Thicker: Jason Greig — and then that same exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in November put him in context and position him as the heir to the tradition of ‘the dark sublime’. How important is it to stake that claim?

Art history has an unfortunate tendency to behave like an exclusive family Christmas. Certain relatives get invited every year. Others — particularly the ones who keep bringing skulls, demons and existential dread to the dinner table — are quietly asked not to come if they can’t behave. For both of us, though, it’s those weird cousins, eccentric aunties and mysterious family members no one talks about who are the most interesting part of the story. That’s where the texture, the contradictions and the real drama live. What gets left out of the family portrait often tells you far more about the family than the smiling faces that made the Christmas card. So we weren’t interested in staking a provocative new claim for the sake of it. We simply don’t think you can tell an honest story about art history — or about Jason Greig — without making room for the dark sublime. It’s always been part of the family.

Q4: And having established that lineage, you decided that it was also necessary to show some of the work of his antecedents — Goya, Redon, Rops, Doré and others. How hard was that to achieve?

This was another one of those moments where it felt as though the dark fates were quietly conspiring in our favour. A friend introduced us to a wonderfully secretive collector who not only happened to own extraordinary works by artists like Goya, Redon, Rops, Kollwitz and Doré, but also shared our conviction that these artists still have urgent things to say about the modern world. They understood the rare power of artists who are willing to stare unflinchingly into the darkest parts of humanity and emerge with something beautiful — or at least something profoundly true. That was always the point of including these works. Blood Is Thicker was never really about tracing Jason’s influences; it was about inheritance and transmutation. We wanted to position Greig not as an isolated eccentric, but as the rightful heir to a dark artistic lineage spanning continents and centuries — one he has revered, wrestled with and ultimately made his own. We also didn’t want to treat those artists as just source material, or relics entombed in dusty art history books. They remain vividly alive, stirring through Jason’s work, the exhibition, and, perhaps more importantly, through our own uneasy present.

Q5: If these are his international antecedents, who else in Aotearoa art has walked this dark path?

People often imagine Aotearoa art standing in bright, clear light, gazing thoughtfully at majestic mountains. But that’s only half the story. The other half has always been taking place in the shadows behind the shed, beyond the edge of town or just out of sight. Tony Fomison understood that saints and derelicts often wore the same face. Don Driver found abject poetry in everyday materials, transforming them into strange, unsettling relics. Rosaleen Norton, known as ‘the witch of King’s Cross’, was actually ‘born under a thunder cloud’ in Dunedin — and should be revered as the dark queen of this tradition. Today, a new generation of artists in Aotearoa is pushing that lineage in multiple unexpected directions. Most count Jason Greig as a touchstone. We’ve always produced artists willing to confront death, violence, desire and the uncanny. Jason Greig stands firmly at the bleeding heart of that tradition. Like the artists who both came before and follow him, he understands that the brightest light also casts the deepest shadows. The time has come to rethink the stories we tell about art in Aotearoa on these terms. So, with the creepiest of smiles, we have started to work on our next major project: a reimagining — or perhaps a recalibration — of what has been termed ‘The New Zealand Gothic’.

Q6: Did the public response to the exhibition at the Dowse take you by surprise?

What surprised us wasn’t that people loved it. It was how they loved it. People kept coming back — we heard three, five, eight times! They’d return with friends in tow like they were introducing them to an unusually charismatic cult. ‘You have to meet this exhibition,’ they’d say. ‘It’s horrible. You’ll adore it.’ As curators, that’s about the highest compliment you can hope for. Great exhibitions don’t just attract visitors — they create evangelists. Watching people enthusiastically recruit friends into Jason’s strange, dark and beautiful world was one of the great joys of the project.

Q7: A exhibition is one thing, a book is another. What did this book enable you to take further?

We adore making exhibitions, but a 100-word exhibition label can only ever be a tantalising taste. It’s a total tease. A book lets you trap people in your cold, dark world. Suddenly they’re alone with your argument for several hundred pages. You can gently lure them into Goya, take a sharp left into heavy metal, wander through werewolves and Romanticism, and before they know it they’re nodding along to a theory they would have considered completely ridiculous 20 pages earlier. Books are wonderfully devious like that. They let you lead readers deeper and deeper into strange territory, making unlikely connections that would never fit on a gallery wall. By the time they realise how far they’ve come, it’s much too late to turn back. That’s a particular kind of magic that only books can perform. If we’ve done our job properly, you’ll finish the book convinced Jason Greig is a dark genius . . . but you may have lost a couple of toes to frostbite along the way.

Q8: How much of a challenge was it to write this book as a team?

Surprisingly smooth — it’s not our first bite at the apple and we have developed a mode that this book let us fully push and explore. The writing itself was actually the easy part after spending three years sitting in bars, cars and gallery storerooms talking about Jason Greig. By the time we started writing, we’d already argued our way through most of the ideas. We have the rare gift of never getting bored with each other. Instead, we just keep encouraging one another further and further down the same rabbit holes. We sometimes joke that we had no choice but to become close collaborators; the only alternative was to become bitter rivals and fight each other to the death. Thankfully, we both have far too many books we’d still like to write to spend our time plotting each other's demise.

Q9: Favourite work for each of you? And why?

Chelsea: A werewolf titled The Pusher howled at me for years from the stockroom of Hamish McKay Gallery. It perfectly captures Jason’s gift for making monsters feel oddly vulnerable. I’d go and visit it from time to time, quietly promising that one day, when I was properly grown up and could afford such things, I’d take it home. Sadly, before I ever mastered the dark art of budgeting, it was acquired by a certain well-known actor who shall remain nameless, but who famously played an iconic vampire in a Wellington vampire mockumentary. Naturally, I’m still a little bitter. But it’s also a wonderfully fitting home, and somehow speaks perfectly to the strange, supportive community of gothically inclined creatives in Aotearoa and the things they do in the shadows.

Aaron: The God’s Back Passage series. It perfectly captures what I love most about Jason’s work: the collision of the sacred and the profane. Those rocky clefts, brooding and elemental, become enchanted thresholds between worlds, real and imagined. Then Jason takes one of the most revered traditions in New Zealand art — the search for the sublime in the landscape — and responds by gleefully mooning it. That title is a magnificent act of artistic irreverence, yet the works themselves remain genuinely majestic. He never asks us to choose between the profound and the absurd.

Q10: Is Jason Greig now paid the tribute he is due?

No. Our biggest fear in making this project was that we might accidentally embalm him. Jason Greig is still making extraordinary work. There are many more monoprints and paintings to come, and many more stories still to be told. The best outcome would be if a younger generation of art historians read this book and immediately felt compelled to chase us through the village square with flaming pitchforks, shouting about everything we got wrong. Peter Vangioni, who also contributed an essay to this book, laid much of the groundwork for thinking seriously about Jason’s practice. We were building on that. Hopefully someone else will build on us. This book isn’t the last word. It’s the opening argument.