Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2018 i Art New Zealand

I first met Cheryll Sotheran in 1978 during rehearsals for The Beaux’ Stratagem, a University of Auckland Theatre Workshop production directed by Mervyn Thompson. (I was the production designer.) Cheryll, already known for her impressive performances in the university’s Summer Shakespeare productions, played the female lead, Mrs Sullen, opposite Michael Neill, another fine actor. The play is a sexy romp and Cheryll, beautiful, witty and flirtatious as the role demands, commanded the stage with the force of her personality. Cheryll had completed her MA in English in 1969 at Auckland University. She went on to do further research in the art history department and taught there for several years. With Elizabeth Eastmond, she established the Women in Art paper in 1981. Rather than following the standard lecture and tutorial format,…

The ‘journey’, as an observing layman might put it, begins with a notebook, a spiral-bound ‘visual diary’. There are shelves of them in Barry Cleavin’s studio. He may go through one in a couple of weeks, or over months or days, but what happens with any is much the same, while each is vastly various. There is a pen and ink drawing on the recto of each page. With some there is no necessarily thematic drift, with others there may be a spate of attention to one object or motif. Most pages are dated, some have a word or two, or a sentence that seemed important to jot down. As there is usually no determining visual sequence, each turned page comes as a surprise. A recent notebook I pick up…

Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery opened in 2014 in an award-winning custom-made building designed by Mitchell & Stout Architects. Since then, it has established itself as a sought-out destination in the art itineraries of its local community and beyond. The spatial tensions presented by the building’s diverse internal architecture are part of every visit. In the spring of 2017, exhibitions in the two large galleries made good use of the possibilities of each space to create installations of complexity. On first encounter, the entrance to the large ground-floor gallery may seem blocked by a 12-metre curved wall. As I walk alongside it, in a space that functions like a passageway—a half-way or going-to space—an other-worldly soundscape can be heard. Its shifting moods and tonal layers have been created by Auckland…

Over the last 26 years, the Pacific Sisters have used their sisterhood to claim alternative futures, presents and pasts, by reimagining the spaces they inhabit. The worlds they created in warehouses, nightclubs, festivals and art museums was anything but small. Often described as the Pacific version of Andy Warhol’s Factory, this loose collective of Maori and Pacific artists, fashion designers, performers, musicians and jewellery makers has been hugely influential in asserting a Maori and Pacific presence in the country. Founded in 1992 by Suzanne Tamaki (Tuhoe), Niwhai Tupaea (Ngati Katoa) and Selina Forsyth (Samoan), the sisterhood grew to incorporate core members Rosanna Raymond ( NZ Samoan/ European), Ani O’Neill (Cook Islands/Irish), Jaunnie ‘Illohaia (Tongan), Lisa Reihana (Nga Puhi), Henry Taripo (Cook Islands) and Feeonaa Wall (NZ/Samoa/Sweden/Germany). Their definition of tino…

Hiking in New Zealand is not dissimilar to walking the Camino Real in northern Spain. With the monotony of physical exertion amidst startling scenery, it can resolve itself into a pilgrimage, which, if completed at the right stage of life, in the right state of mind, can be a transformative, uplifting and religious experience. Mine was a day-long trek to the sand fan on Cape Maria van Diemen, in search of Placostylus ambagiosus—giant land snails. Descending the cliff from the Cape Reinga carpark was more a metaphysical ascent into another, other-worldly, heavenly place, one of solitude, silence, heat and intense colour, where the snails lived a precarious hidden existence amongst the flax roots. The pilgrimage that Richard Adams experienced was more substantial: at the age of 20 he undertook a…

In August 1964 Colin McCahon resigned from his position as Keeper and Deputy Director at the Auckland City Art Gallery to become Lecturer in painting at the Elam School of Fine Arts. Over the next seven years he was an influential and inspirational teacher, leading by example as a practising artist, and instilling in his students the need for a dedicated and professional approach to painting. Direct observation and analysis were fundamental to McCahon’s teaching philosophy, and encouraged by means of a series of standard exercises. The best-known of these, and routinely set for first-year students, was the challenge of depicting a pair of eggs on a white saucer on a white base. McCahon’s own student days in Dunedin may have provided a precedent for this approach; at Saturday-morning art…

Auckland Benjamin Work Whenua Fonua ‘Enua Malcolm Smith Gallery 6 November–2 December IOANA GORDON-SMITH When I think of Benjamin Work’s practice, the richness of Tongan visual language comes to mind. The artist has derived from artefacts a rich taxonomy of patterns that offer both aesthetic and mnemonic potential. Whenua Fonua ‘Enua at Malcolm Smith Gallery offers an interesting spin on his practice. The solo exhibition takes place in the artist’s hometown—or close enough to, having been raised in Pakuranga. It is unsurprising then that place is a central focus. More interesting is the subsequent layering of local and migrated relationships to place. It is a heady dynamic, foreshadowed in the trilingual exhibition title. The exhibition centres around how place is indexed by different visual codes. There is a good range…

In January, in a crowded Christchurch Art Gallery auditorium, Jacqueline Fahey, celebrated feminist painter and author, known for her forthright, outspoken take on life and art, left the audience spellbound with candid flashes of brilliance. Something was in the air that night . . . was it a sense of (re)claiming? I suspect so. Fahey’s long career is well documented.1 Born into a well-educated Irish-Catholic family in Timaru, she survived Teschemakers convent school near Oamaru, and went on to study at Canterbury College School of Art under Russell Clark and Bill Sutton. Rebellious, she baulked at the gentility of Christchurch. Now, decades later, she is back where it all began with a remarkable first solo exhibition in the city. Informed by her socialist stance, Fahey’s talk was one of tantalising…

BRIDIE LONIE The koru works of Gordon Walters were first exhibited in 1966 at New Vision Gallery in Auckland. For many, these remain his signature pieces. Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s extensive Gordon Walters: New Vision counters this view, placing the artist firmly within mid-century modernist transatlantic abstraction while remaining even-handedly attentive to the complementary factors of his position in a bicultural Pacific nation. Curated by Lucy Hammonds, Julia Waite and Laurence Simmons, the exhibition and its accompanying book were produced in conjunction with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and draw on the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Loan Collection of the Gordon Walters Estate.1 Both present a retrospective of Walters’ work as well as an intellectual history of the implications of abstraction’s insistence on the separation between art and life.…

Karawai Street, Ruakaka, could have been the setting for a New Zealand adaptation of Edward Scissorhands. The low brick bungalows, set in close proximity to the street and to each other, have knee-high fences that offer no privacy, shelter nor containment. There are no large dogs, secretive smokers or hidden gardens; instead the grid of development is displayed, while a nod is given to the notion of friendly community. There is a bit of an ‘everystreet’ feel to the place, which shares something of the appearance and social intentions of the garden suburb designs of the 1930s and ’40s state housing schemes. Nevertheless, Karawai Street is not a well-preserved suburb of quality mid-century social housing. The Marsden Power Station Village was constructed in the 1960s. Here streets are wide and…

Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand, 1930–1980 by Leonard Bell Auckland University Press, Auckland 2017 WILLIAM DART  It was a privilege last November to be amongst the crush at the launch of Leonard Bell’s Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand, 1930–1980. Auckland University’s Gus Fisher Gallery contributed its own resonance to the occasion. In September 2001, it had hosted a complementary exhibition for a similarly themed symposium, ‘Displacement and Creativity: Refugees and the Arts in New Zealand’, for which Bell had played a co-ordinating role. There was also art on display in 2017. Speeches were delivered in front of a selection of photographs, including four interiors of Auckland’s now-demolished 1ZB Radio Studios, designed by Imi Porsolt, balanced by three atmospheric portraits of distinguished…