Jane Venis’s Shiner is an art work that provides a powerful commentary on the damaging and often cyclical nature of domestic violence.

Shown in California as part of St Mary’s College Museum of Art’s exhibition, Social Justice: It Happens to One, It Happens to All, the work is a punching bag inlaid with about 400 sharp metal spikes.

 The work was originally created for Venis’s exhibition called Gymnauseum, which considered the futility and self-flagellation of gym exercise. Venis reframed its context and meaning for the Social Justice exhibition.

 “The wonderful thing about artworks is they can be open to all sorts of interpretations,” Venis says. “In terms of domestic violence, I am looking at the idea that the perpetrator harms the victim and also harms themselves – and has usually been a victim themselves. The cycle of violence in families means everyone is being damaged.”

Shiner was exhibited alongside contributions from other artists from the United States, Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom. The exhibition was curated by Karen Gutfreund and Sherri Cornett, who specialise in exhibitions on the theme of art as activism.

“I attended the opening and I really enjoyed the way the curators and contributing artists came together and talked about their work,” she says. “I got to know everybody else and hear about what they were doing in the field of art for social justice.”

Much of Venis’s art has a humorous edge – but is underpinned by serious social commentary.

“Gymnauseum for example had something to say about the pressure people are put under to conform to that traditional body type,” she explains. “And it doesn’t matter how old you are – you hear ‘60 is the new 40’ and so on. I like to say ‘dead is still the new dead’; everybody needs some time to just relax as well.”

One of her other recent exhibitions held at the Forrester Galley in Oamaru and then City Gallery in Invercargill, featured beautifully-crafted instruments with an absurd twist – with an accompanying ‘infomercial’. The works reflect Venis’s research area of chindogu, the wry Japanese art of creating ridiculous, multi-purpose objects as a solution to some perceived problem.

 “My work Panjo is a frying pan that is also a banjo, so you can play it and then cook eggs in it,” she says. “I like to use chindogu as a way of looking at sustainability and consumerism - how many more pointless things do we need on this planet?”