Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2021 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Martin Ball Echo: A Brush with History Orexart, 10 April–1 May MICHAEL DUNN Ball To many ’s Echo will come as a surprise. Instead of his meticulously crafted drawings and portraits we find a display of landscapes depicting the famous Pink and White Terraces, once natural wonders that drew tourists from around the world, but which disappeared from view as the result of the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. While the show is a change of direction it does have continuities with his earlier work. The new paintings are sourced in historic photographs of the terraces taken by George D. Valentine. Ball began this series in 2005 but has evolved it mainly since 2018. In notes for the show, he states that he has used photocopied…

Two of the Walters Prize finalists do one thing, and two another. Sonya Lacey and Sriwhana Spong make art that revolves around themselves, and their installations are collections of parts. The works of Fiona Amundsen and the Mata Aho Collective/ Maureen Lander, on the other hand, reflect many voices, coordinated into a total entity. Lacey and Spong use multiple mediums across works that variously intrigue, delight, impress and perplex. You first respond to the things in the space, and to what the materials are doing, before making sense of them (unless you have read a good deal beforehand). Then comes the backstory, filling in the gaps with complicated histories within which the artists are at once insignificant and central figures. With Amundsen and the Mata Aho Collective/ Lander, there is…

Recently two notable cultural institutions in Wellington have been eviscerated by bureaucratic British incomers, in the name of ‘refocusing’ on Māori and Pasifika cultures. The National Library is disposing of more than 600,000 publications in the Overseas Published Collection in order to concentrate on Aotearoa and the Pacific―never mind that much of our culture has been shaped by western and other civilisations and that Aotearoa is home to people from more than 200 ethnic groups. Experience Wellington, seemingly with no consultation with iwi, has put in place a controversial staff restructure in the name of ‘embracing te ao Māori’, which will almost certainly curtail the wide-ranging international exhibition programme offered by City Gallery Wellington.1 I have yet to encounter anyone who would disagree with the need to enhance the visibility,…

It could be said that the plains of South Taranaki are just that. Unfussy. Pragmatic. Cows get milked; bread gets baked; rugby gets played. The people might grumble, but they get on with the task at hand anyway It was . a stretch of belief then when Pihama Lavender started production inside , an abandoned dairy factory in 2013. Under the guidance of owner Liz Sinclair, the soil produced not grass―green, thick, lush, milk-producing grass―but lavender and, at a pinch, this place was less the provinces, more Provence. Suddenly the prospect of aromas, oils and propagation introduced a world that was frankly a little fussy, less sensible. It is a further stretch of belief to enter Pihama Lavender in the month of May, the time around which Roger Peters’ Songs…

At first sight Alan Ibell’s paintings may seem somewhat bland and unchallenging. They do not leap out at you but instead have seductive qualities that gradually emerge as we contemplate them one by one. We start to grasp that there is a slippage between what we see superficially and what is suggested beneath the surface of these images. In notes about his show Ascendants, held at Sanderson Contemporary earlier this year, Ibell writes: ‘One of my main interests is in creating a space within the paintings that recalls the subconscious or a psychological environment like that of a dream―a space where the strange and the mundane/domestic cohabit.’ This helps us to understand, for example, The Return, in which a small figure is set in a foreground plane with a soft…

At the start of 2021, preparations were made for a ngatu tāhina and a ngatu tapa‘ingatu (Tongan barkcloth), both in the collection of Canterbury Museum, to travel north. The two were to take part in ‘Amui ‘i Mu‘a―Ancient Futures, an exhibition I knew little of until I arrived at the opening night to see both ngatu displayed in context, amongst other manifestations of Tongan knowledge, visual language, and social systems. Ethnographic collection items are the skilful manifestations and innovations of a person’s or people’s political, social and economic systems and practices. The management of such items requires a level of care typically overlooked but is increasingly being practised; prompted by members of origin communities, including their transnational whanaunga/aiga/family. Pacifica artists re-examining and re-contextualising museum objects, spaces and records is inevitably…

I first met Arne Loot in the Cats’ Bar in the Kiwi Hotel. He had straight blonde hair cut long, and wore a brown blouson jacket, standing out from the dark suits and white shirts of the other male drinkers. I had heard of Arne, as we both lived in Titirangi, 13 miles out of Auckland. He was known as the Dutchman of Scenic Drive, who played classical music down the party telephone, which showed he was a delightful maverick. In the 1960s the pub closed at six p.m., so I was pleased to cadge a lift from him back home instead of getting the ‘six o’clock swill’, the bus full of drunk workers. I visited his house which he had built himself, hidden in the bush. He had a…

Conversātiō: In the Company of Bees by Anne Noble Massey University Press, Auckland 2021 DON ABBOTT To many, bees are a source of wonder and mystery. They have occupied the life and work of photographer Anne Noble for a decade; in Conversātiō she suggests that a colony of bees can be seen as ‘an object of wonder that reminds us of how little we know about the interrelated complexity of the world’. This book explores bees through the lens of Noble’s oeuvre over several years, culminating in the 2018 work of the same name, when it was part of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. The book is more than an art book but it operates perfectly well as one; included are photographs from Noble’s bee-related exhibitions that…

I’ve made larger than life pieces and at the same time I’ve always made very small and intimate pieces which were more like fleeting thoughts, but which may have had a big idea behind them . . . as my art education evolved and my interest in things grew beyond just working with clay . . . I was working more with ideas than with just making product. Christine Boswijk, 20201 Moving reflectively through the exhibition space of Christine Boswijk: Thinking Through My Hands offered a fresh experience of major work. Breathing life into clay is a metaphor that this artist has referred to throughout her career. As she states in her foreword to the show’s catalogue, she would ‘breathe life into it, fire it, and my thoughts would become…

From the chew-them-up, spit-them-out experiences in New York downtown galleries in the 1980s to recent blockbuster surveys such as 2010’s Art in the Streets at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, graffiti and street art have a complicated history with galleries and museums. From rebellious outsider forms that bypassed institutional support, urban art’s popularity, ubiquity and influence have made for an interesting, if challenging, proposition for display. As urban art has gained more widespread attention, this relationship has followed similar trajectories here in Aotearoa, with disparate and independent excursions accompanied by the crowd-pleasing Rise at Canterbury Museum in 2013 and Paradox at Tauranga Art Gallery in 2016. Additionally, local graffiti and street artists have increasingly embraced more expansive approaches, shifting between street, studio and gallery, retaining the influence of their…

Christopher Aubrey surely qualifies as the mystery man of early New Zealand painting. Although his works are held in a number of public institutions—including no fewer than 35 in the National Library—very little is known about him. There are no reliable records of his date and place of birth and background, or whether he immigrated to New Zealand. On the other hand, it was noted early on that the highly detailed nature of his drawing of buildings did suggest he may have received some technical training.1 A dated watercolour of Grafton Gully in the Auckland Art Gallery collection indicates Aubrey was active in this country by at least 1868. He subsequently went to the bottom of the South Island, and then systematically worked his way north, producing paintings of natural…

Looking back through twentieth-century New Zealand art history to a time when England was fondly referred to as ‘the mother country’, the pull to the United Kingdom for aspiring artists from the colonies was strong—embracing the cultural milieu only cities like London, Paris or Rome could offer. Exciting study opportunities, first-hand access to art history and major artworks awaited. At a time when long-distance travel was by sea, many artists spent extended periods away, some becoming expatriates, while others returned. Embracing modern ideas and new theories often coincided with periods of experimentation and major breakthroughs, and for those artists returning home to teach, a willingness to share. This was the case for Christchurch-born painter Paul Olds (1922–1976) who left for the UK in 1951 and remained in Europe for almost…