­Cut from building paper, Kirsty Lillico’s sculptures represent architectural floorplans from a selection of modernist concrete apartment buildings: the Symonds Street Flats (Auckland), the Gordon Wilson Memorial Flats (Wellington), and the apartment of Dr Robert Laing, a character in J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel ‘High Rise’.

 Modernist architecture has been employed as a dystopian backdrop in countless films; feeding the popular opinion that these buildings are cold, authoritarian and depressing. Monsters emerge from these backdrops; from our imagination and from fear of the unknown. This rhetoric of fear has been seized on by politicians, developers, and other forces keen to erase the traces of our recent past.

 Like a necromancer, Lillico re-animates the remains of modernism, to draw out ideas of fairness, collectivism, and the liveability of our cities.