Nigel Brown: I AM / WE ARE provides an engaging overview of Nigel Brown’s oeuvre to date. Works that prove instantly recognisable to the general public are featured alongside many that may be less familiar, offering a fresh look at Brown’s artistic scope.

While diverse in subject matter, together the artworks form a stylistically coherent exhibition with a focus on Brown’s distinctive use of symbolism and text. Themes include individual and collective New Zealand identity, liberal politics, our natural environment, and the family.

This is a visually impressive exhibition featuring several large-scale paintings that have never been displayed in a public gallery setting. It would appeal strongly to many groups

including:

• Local audiences, as an accessible show of one of the country’s most fondly regarded painters.
• Overseas visitors keen to experience distinctively New Zealand contemporary art.
• School groups, due to Nigel Brown being a commonly studied NZ artist. The inclusion of carved woodblocks along with their prints gives a great opportunity for education into that medium.

An accompanying catalogue will give insight into the main themes represented in the exhibition and the common threads that draw them together.

All works are from the collection of Nigel Brown and Susan McLaughlin. A full list of artworks (with high resolution images) is available on request.

CONTACT
Curated by Jessica Mio
Exhibitions Curator
Aigantighe Art Gallery
gallery@timdc.govt.nz
Phone 03 688 4424

Aigantighe Art Gallery is the organising venue and touring agency for this exhibition.

‘Euan Macleod / Painter’ is the first major touring exhibition of Macleod’s work on this side of the Tasman. Christchurch-born, but resident in Sydney since the early 1980s, Euan Macleod has produced a singular, remarkable and gripping body of work. Spanning three decades of a prolific career, the 39 canvases in the exhibition take us on a journey not only through physical landscapes but also through states of mind and being. As well as asking how each of us engages with nature, the exhibition hints at myths and narratives from human history–processes of discovery, conflict and resolution.

Many of these paintings are self-portraits. With impassioned, visceral applications of oil paint, Macleod depicts himself marching, striding and covering ground. The exhibition features works painted in New Zealand as well as Australia– alpine and coastal vistas contrast with the baked or scrub-covered outback. Macleod paints himself from different vantage points; he buries himself in earth and clay, he dissolves into a plume of volcanic smoke. He is consumed by fire; he is drowned and then resuscitated. Extending, rather than being confined by, the genre of self-portraiture, Macleod is that rare being, an artist ‘prepared to push the boat out into uncharted waters and dare to take a risk’, as Peter Ross observed in his history of the Archibald Prize (which Macleod won in 1999).

With its striking imagery, raw, impasto surfaces and immense vitality, ‘Euan Macleod / Painter’ will excite, inspire and challenge viewers of all ages and backgrounds.

EUAN MACLEOD—BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Born in Christchurch in 1956, Macleod completed a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting) at Canterbury University. Moving to Sydney, he held his first solo exhibition in 1981 at Watters Gallery, East Sydney. Just as his works are infused with landscapes from both his birthplace and his adopted home, Macleod has, throughout his career, exhibited on both sides of the Tasman. Since his Self-portrait; head like a hole won Australia’s most prestigious art prize, the Archibald Prize for Portraiture, in 1999, he has received numerous awards, including the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 2006 and the Gallipoli Prize (2009). Macleod is represented in public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Christchurch Art Gallery. A monograph to accompany this exhibition, Euan Macleod—the painter in the painting, by curator/writer Gregory O’Brien, is published by Piper Press, Sydney

YOUNG COUNTRY

Young Country is a fresh and engaging exhibition that brings together nineteenth-century photography and contemporary poetry to offer a new and often surprising view of New Zealand’s past.

The images are the work of William Williams, a Railways employee who worked and photographed widely through the country. His outstanding photographs reflect the rawness of New Zealand’s changing landscape as well as its beauty, and offer intriguing and unusual portraits of family and friends at work, home and play. Their rich detail, striking composition and absorbing content come as a revelation to many viewers. This is work that encourages contemplation, and rewards getting up close, looking and re-looking.

Kerry Hines has researched Williams’s work and context and written poems to accompany a selection of his photographs. Some are presented here as text accompanying photographs on the wall, while others can be heard while viewing images in the DVD work that forms part of the exhibition. The poems are colloquial, vivid and accessible, and include imagined elements as well as drawing on the subjects and contexts of the photographs. Together, poems and photographs combine to create a work that is multi-faceted, immersive, and speculative, inviting reflection on how we envision our history.

Wayne Barrar – Hand-made albumen prints
Uniquely the exhibition features albumen prints made from Williams’s negatives by contemporary photographer Wayne Barrar. Most of Williams’s archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library is in the form of glass plate negatives and lantern slides, and scans of these would typically be used to make digital prints for exhibition. The hand-made albumen prints produced here, using nineteenth-century processes, not only yield beautiful tones and details (ideally suited to Williams’s work) but provide a similar material and visual feel to the prints Williams and his peers would have produced.
Albumen prints are rarely made today since the process is extremely complex, painstaking and time-consuming – including careful separation of egg whites for the albumen base, precise hand-coating of the paper to avoid bubbling, long exposures in UV light, and gold toning. On a few occasions albumen exhibition prints have been made overseas using ‘historic’ negatives, but it appears that Young Country may be the first time this has been done in New Zealand.

William Williams, though not yet widely known, is an outstanding photographer and his are some of the strongest and most informative images of colonial New Zealand I have seen. It’s rare to see such intimate images of domestic life in the period either side of 1900, not to mention clear, well-composed and forceful images of towns, harbours, trains, buildings (both Maori and Pakeha), interiors, landscape features, bush scenes, farms and the like, all beautifully rendered in historically appropriate albumen prints by Wayne Barrar.

Kerry Hines’ poems offer vividly various pictures of colonial New Zealand, both in its ‘male only’ and more domestic aspects. The poems are often dramatic in form and, though often fictional in character, draw imaginatively on the language world of colonial institutions such as courts and newspapers. The relation of poems to photographs is subtle and various – sometimes direct, sometimes oblique – and collectively they constitute a verbally adroit parallel universe to Williams’ images.

Peter Simpson – editor, curator and writer about NZ art and literature.

Audiences

Young Country offers something fresh and unique in its combination of poems, historical images and contemporary albumen prints. While it will particularly appeal to lovers of photography, poetry and history (and offer an opportunity to draw in local communities of interest including creative writers, camera clubs, historical societies and genealogists), it will also engage a wider audience that enjoys work that is contemplative, rich in content, thought-provoking (and shot through with occasional humour).

The exhibition might also be integrated into school programmes for senior students, with potential to link to the senior secondary curriculum in subjects such as English, visual arts, art history and history.

Supporting material

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a 193 page hard-cover book, also titled Young Country, published by Auckland University Press in November 2014 (RRP $35). Book and show include substantially overlapping content, but each contains work that is not included in the other.

Audio Visual

DVD audio-visual presentation of poems and photographs for projection or monitor display.
Voice over / readings by Kerry Hines. (running time approx. 20 minutes).

Public Programmes

Depending on the presenters’ availability, there is potential for public programme events in association with the exhibition (such as a floor talk and/or poetry reading at the venue by Kerry Hines, and a talk on the albumen printing process and nineteenth-century photography by Wayne Barrar).

Background on the artists

The Photographer

• William Williams was active as a photographer in New Zealand from 1881 until the 1940s. An employee of the Railways department, he moved around the country in connection with his employment, as well as travelling widely in association with his interests in tramping and canoeing.
• He produced a substantial and engaging body of photographs, including landscapes, urban scenes, and portraits of family and friends, and his work was well regarded by his contemporaries.
• The principal archive of his work is held by the Alexander Turnbull Library, where it is highly rated for its quality and its scope.
• Some of his images have been reproduced in contemporary settings including books, TV and film histories and museum displays, but have rarely been credited to him (as is often the case with reproductions of ‘historical’ photographs). Consequently, while his photography is not entirely unknown, Williams himself is not well known.

The Poet

• Kerry Hines is a New Zealand poet, writer and researcher whose work has been published in books and literary journals here and overseas. She has given readings and presentations on her work in the UK, Australia, Iceland and NZ (including at the National Library Gallery; Mahara Gallery, Waikanae; City Gallery, Wellington; Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui; and Straumur International Arts Centre, Iceland).
• Young Country draws on her PhD in creative writing (Victoria University, 2012), as does her essay “William Williams and ‘The Old Shebang’”, in Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, ed. Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf, University of Otago Press, 2011.

The ‘Printer’

• Wayne Barrar is an internationally recognised photographer with an extensive record of exhibition and publication in photography. He has a long-standing interest in the history of photography, and has worked with processes such as albumen printing, including the production of albumen prints from digital negatives, in his own practice.
• Wayne is Associate Professor (Photography) at the School of Art, Massey University Wellington.

Further responses to Young Country

The exhibition was shown at Mahara Gallery in November-December 2014.

Arts Commentator Mark Amery described Young Country on Nine to Noon as ‘incredibly rich, creative, immediate’ and as offering an unexpected view of New Zealand (in terms of both its landscape and social life).

In discussing the book on Saturday Morning, Greg O’Brien and Kim Hill referred to it as ‘extraordinary’, ‘a magnificent thing’, ‘very funny’, ’very insightful’ and ‘utterly fascinating’. O’Brien noted too that students of New Zealand history and photography would be ‘pretty amazed’ by Williams’s ‘remarkable images’.

Mirek Smisek

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1925, Mirek Smíšek (OBE) has forged a career as a remarkable New Zealand artist since arriving here in 1951. Mahara Gallery has produced the first ever full survey exhibition and accompanying publication considering Smíšek’s life’s work.

“Mahara Gallery’s exhibition ‘Mirek Smíšek: 60 Years 60 Pots’ is a stunning survey of our pioneering studio potter. Mirek’s ceramics are gutsy, resolute and brilliantly muscular. In balancing his forms with innovative texture and limpid glazes he creates pots that actually breathe with life. His melding of ancient Asian and Continental ceramic traditions is a bravura affirmation of an artist’s innate affection for the everyday. An important exhibition celebrating an exceptional talent”. Ron Brownson, Senior Curator New Zealand and Pacific Art, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o T?maki.

“Mirek was one of the earliest and a genuine pioneer of studio pottery in New Zealand who gave inspiration to us all. He needs to be at least as well known as the generation that followed him. ‘Mirek Smíšek: 60 Years 60 Pots’ is a genuine revelation of his achievement”. Hamish Keith, art writer and cultural commentator.

“Mirek Smíšek is one of our great treasures. In the 25 years I have spent working on the fringes – and at the heart – of the decorative arts, Mirek stands out as a maker of real stature, accomplishment and generosity. His personal story, his ‘attitude’ as a maker, his innovative practice and his distinctive works deserve wider recognition and fuller appreciation”. Tim Walker, past Director of The New Dowse, art consultant. 

“In the pantheon of those other ‘core’ post Second World War studio potters who laid the path for another way in studio based ceramics, Smíšek’s career has, surprisingly, not yet received a full survey and analysis which records and recognizes his achievements. This unquestionably needs to happen to extend and balance the conversations about his part of the story”. Louis le Vaillant, Director / Curator The Johnston Collection, Melbourne.

“For too long we have tended to concentrate on the work of just a few of our senior potters to the exclusion of others. This extremely valuable and comprehensive exhibition and its fine accompanying book achieve for Mirek Smíšek something that was due to him many years ago. His work always had a distinctive character which needs to be recognised again as interest in the history of New Zealand’s studio pottery steadily continues to grow”                  Peter Shaw, curator, art historian and writer.
 

Brief Biography

Born in Bohemia in 1925, Smíšek left Communist Czechoslovakia in 1948 in search of freedom and determined to live a creative life, after spending much of War Two in Nazi prisons and labour camps. He began his working life as a potter in Canberra and Sydney in 1948-49, then assisted English potter Ernie Shufflebottom at Crown Lynn in Auckland in 1951. He became New Zealand’s first independent studio potter in 1954, establishing a studio in Nelson, and galvanizing the beginnings of the pottery movement there. During his sixteen years in Nelson, Smíšek also travelled widely, and worked in Japan with pottery Masters Shoji Hamada and Kenjiro Kawai, and with Bernard Leach at his pottery at St Ives in Cornwall. In 1968 he moved to the Kapiti Coast, and has built three studios here over the past 40 years. He has continued to work prolifically on domestic ware which fuses function and aesthetic qualities to a high degree, inspired by ancient sources including Celtic and medieval Europe, the pre-Japanese Jomon civilization and the 20th century Mingei folk-craft movement.

Smíšek’s work is represented in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, England, Fiji, Germany, Japan, Korea, the U.S.A and New Zealand. He was awarded a Diploma for Distinguished Work by the World Crafts Council at their 1974 International Exhibition in Toronto and an OBE for his services to New Zealand pottery in 1990.

Exhibition Content:
Sixty works surveying Smíšek’s key forms of bowls, yunomi, vases, jugs, crocks and plates. The earliest work was made in Sydney in 1949; 3 pieces of Bohemia ware from Crown Lynn, Auckland, 1951; early work from Nelson, 1954-68; Kapiti, 1969-2009.

Presentation:
Eight large bowls presented as wall works, four large crocks and vases on floor-plinths. 48 smaller bowls, yunomi, jugs and vases displayed in five enclosed wall-cabinets.

Exhibition Team:
Curator:
New Zealand painter Gary Freemantle initiated and selected this survey exhibition with Mahara Gallery. He brings a fresh approach to Mirek Smíšek’s work to the project, having lived at Smíšek’s Te Horo pottery in 1990 and collected his work since then.
Advisory Curator and writer:
Justine Olsen, Curator, Contemporary Decorative Arts, Te Papa Tongarewa, and author of Peter Stichbury: a survey of a pioneer New Zealand studio potter (2007).
Exhibition Co-ordinator and writer:
Janet Bayly, Director and Curator, Mahara Gallery

Publication
A 78 page book including all 60 works in the exhibition reproduced in colour, with a foreword by Gillian Deane, biographical essay by Janet Bayly, and critical essay by Justine Olsen, chronology, potter’s marks.
The biographical essay by Janet Bayly puts Smíšek’s work in the context of his life-story, formed by his childhood in Czechoslovakia, his experiences as a POW during World War Two, his move to New Zealand, and the range of international influences on his work.

Justine Olsen’s critical essay surveys Smíšek’s contribution to the development of ceramics as an artform in New Zealand since the 1950s, with reference to the Bernard Leach Pottery at St Ives, the Japanese Mingei folk-art movement and Pottery Masters Shoji Hamada and Kenjiro Kawai.

Audio Visual

Mirek Smíšek, potter (1986). (DVD) An excellent 36 minute video documentary made by Stan Jenkins for the Department of Education, supported by QE 11 Arts Council.

‘The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy’ rediscovers the life and work of one of New Zealand’s most talented and original artists. Percy left this country in the mid-1960s and became a hugely respected artist/illustrator/typographer overseas, while at the same time producing a remarkable body of his own independent art.

This exhibition, and the major publication that accompanies it, celebrates Percy’s achievement as a published illustrator as well as bringing to light a significant body of work never seen before.

His works are held in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland, yet-since his early years in Auckland–they have never been exhibited publicly in New Zealand.

The Artist

Born in Stratford in 1938, Graham Percy studied at Elam School of Fine Arts before embarking on a career as an illustrator/designer/artist. A contemporary of Greer Twiss, Don Binney, Mervyn Williams and Hamish Keith, Percy was taught by Robert Ellis, Michael Nicholson and Colin McCahon (for whom he subsequently designed a number of exhibition invitations). Percy was a pivotal figure in the design and illustration of the New Zealand School Journal in the early 1960s, before transplanting to London, where he illustrated over 100 books. His art appeared in John Berger’s groundbreaking television series and book, Ways of Seeing (1972).  In 1994, Chronicle Books (San Francisco) published a book of his drawings (for an adult readership), Arthouse. In 2007, a recent series of his drawings, ‘Imagined Histories’ was published in the United Kingdom.

In recent years, the art of Graham Percy has featured in a number of New Zealand publications, notably Cover Up -the art of the book cover in New Zealand, by Hamish Thompson (Random House 2007), which included his well-known covers for such iconic books as The End of the Golden Weather and The Pohutukawa Tree. Percy’s art is a major presence in A Nest of Singing Birds; 100 Years of the New Zealand School Journal, by Gregory O’Brien (Learning Media, 2007) and his art also featured in O’Brien’s Back and Beyond-New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious (Auckland University Press, 2008).

Graham Percy died in January 2008. This exhibition and book project has been developed in close association with the artist’s family: his widow Mari Mahr, and his children Martin, Kitty and Yuli.

The Exhibition

The main visual focus of the exhibition will be a series of around 60 large and medium scale drawings. These will include a suite of anthropomorphised kiwis, travelling around the world and through time-a marvellously inventive, anarchic exploration of the national psyche. There will be drawings from ‘Imagined Histories’, a series of bucolic scenarios involving famous composers. (Numerous of these images also reference New Zealand-either faintly echoed or directly evoked). Virtuosic drawings from earlier in Percy’s career will convey a sense of both his remarkable technical prowess as well as his boundless imagination. The large-scale works on paper are particularly strong dynamic productions, in colour or in black and white.

Ephemera

The Imaginative Life and Times will feature some of Percy’s most remarkable book designs, his typographic work (he majored in typography and graphic design at the Royal College of Arts in the 1960s) and his illustrative work for the New Zealand School Journal and for School Bulletins-many of which visitors (of a certain age) to the exhibition will recall vividly.

Content will include;

• Copies of New Zealand School Journals and School Bulletins designed and illustrated by Graham Percy.
• Percy’s early book designs and also his typographical invitations produced for Colin McCahon and for Auckland Art Gallery.
• Original artwork from some of his best-known children’s books: The Fantastic Flying Adventure by Gerald Durrell, Aesop’s Fables, the ‘Sam the Pig’ series by Alison Uttley and Jeremy Lloyd’s The Woodland Gospels.
• Stamp designs for Royal Post, billboard designs for London Underground, illustrations for the Times, Harper and Queens and other periodicals.
• Production drawings and colour backgrounds from the animated film ‘Hugo the Hippo’.
• Period photographs of Graham Percy from the 1960s until 2007.
• Miscellaneous small drawings.

Audio visuals

The show includes two audio-visual presentations;

1. The Hungarian animated film, Hugo the Hippo, which Percy art-directed in the early 1970s (see website link below).

2. A digital film/interactive of the interior of Graham Percy’s house made by the artist’s son Martin Percy. Martin is a London-based video-maker who has in recent years made numerous films for the Tate Modern. Much of the imagery (fantastical as well as ‘realist’) in Percy’s art was drawn from his immediate surroundings. The house he shared with photographer Mari Mahr was-and still is-an encyclopaedic warehouse of forms, symbols, motifs and imaginary scenarios. See details on Martin Percy’s (impressive) work to date at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Percy

The Publication

Auckland University Press will be publishing a book of Graham Percy’s art. The book will be c. 156pp, hardback (with dust-jacket). It will include around 120 reproductions (ie. all of the major pieces in the exhibition, as well as supplementary works). The book will be an artwork in itself rather than an orthodox ‘monographic’ publication. It will feature large-scale colour reproductions, photographs of the artist’s house (the ‘arthouse’ of the 1994 publication, in many respects), and a major account of Percy’s life and work.

The book will be published by Auckland University Press to coincide with the opening of the exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery in May 2011.

Audience for Exhibition and Book

The exhibition and book will reach a wide public-an audience, I hope, as large as that reached by Back and Beyond-New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious and A Nest of Singing Birds-both of which have been remarkably successful. The book will appeal to not only to art-lovers, design enthusiasts and the general bookish public, it will also be accessible to younger people: to primary, secondary and tertiary students.

Like the work of all the great illustrators, Percy’s drawings communicate on many levels-they engage intellectually as well as emotionally. They can be playful and profound at the same time. Although Percy lived for the past forty years in London, his works are often gloriously (and refreshingly) New Zealand-centred. They are a singular playing out of the expatriate condition-they can be funny, touching, insightful, occasionally alarming, but always utterly engaging.

The exhibition and publication will also be a paean to the art of drawing, to the exquisite beauty of the hand-drawn line, to the ink pen and the lead pencil.

Public Programmes

‘The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy’ would be an ideal exhibition for school and university groups (also for trainee teachers). The works touch not only on art history but also on music (see ‘Imagined Histories’, with its cast of composers), social history, practical art, psychology…

Many events could be held in conjunction with the exhibition. Learning Media (formerly School Publications) are enthusiastically behind both the book and exhibition proposal. Events relating to books and book-making, writing and illustrating for children etc could be held. Percy’s work with the School Journal would be an ideal focus for an event.

Percy’s old friends and colleagues include Hamish Keith, Wystan Curnow and Greer Twiss. Floor talks, or a possible seminar, could be held alongside the exhibition. Children’s authors and illustrators (many of whom admire Percy’s work) could offer perspectives.

Websites

Further insight into the work of Graham Percy can be found online, see for example;

• Obituary in The Independent, London:
  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/graham-percy-childrens-illustrator-who-took-a-cerebral-approach-to-his-work-769268.html
• A website devoted mainly to Graham Percy’s illustration for children’s books: http://graham.and.martinpercy.com/
• The film art-directed by Graham Percy has its own website:http://www.hugothehippo.co/
• Numerous excerpts (low resolution) can be sampled on youtube, among them http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVlbf63jsQ

Messages of Support

I strongly support this exhibition project. Graham Percy was a
remarkable New Zealander whose sense of the visual while largely
channelled into his long and internationally successful career as an
illustrator of children’s books was all encompassing and deeply
knowledgeable. This is evident enough in his own art projects, but it
informs everything he did. Percy possessed a native humanism, which he
laced with humour.  The freshness of feeling  with which he imbued
the conventions he worked with and the art that he made, relied on an
original and highly nuanced sense of comedy which ranged  from the
gentle and subtly understated to the satirical and the wickedly witty.
Gregory O”Brien’s comprehensive exhibition  offers New Zealanders
their first opportunity to properly appreciate the work  and career of
a uniquely talented and successful compatriot.
WYSTAN CURNOW

Graham Percy was  one of the finest book illustrators New Zealand has produced. The circumstances of his talent obliged him to leave New Zealand in 1967 and shift to the UK where he flourished. Sadly his work is not as well know in his home country as it deserves to be, but he never grew far from or denied his New Zealand roots. Even in his last works he was exploring ideas only a New Zealander could explore. A comprehensive exhibition of is work is long overdue.
HAMISH KEITH

” Along with Jill McDonald, another under-valued talent of the School
Journal in the early 1960’s, Graham Percy’s art and subsequent career
in the UK have not received the recognition due to them in New
Zealand.  Like the book and exhibition of 100 years of the School
Journal – “A Nest of Singing Birds”, I would expect Gregory O’Brien’s
book on Graham Percy and its accompanying exhibition to appeal to a
wide audience of young and old, students, art-lovers and the general
public.Learning Media offers its support and encouragement.”
MARGARET STYLES |Learning Media

Not only was Graham Percy an important artist and designer in  New
Zealand during the 1960s, he went on to become one of the foremost
book illustrators in Great Britain, producing work for Faber & Faber
and other leading publishers. Book illustration-children’s
illustration in particular–has yet to receive the attention it
deserves in this country. This exhibition and book will please and
enlighten a wide audience, of all ages and backgrounds.
KATE DE GOLDI

The Curator

Gregory O’Brien worked between 1997 and 2009 as a curator at City Gallery Wellington. He was Frank Sargeson Fellow in 1988 and was Victoria University Writer in Residence in 1995. As well as writing poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he has exhibited widely as a painter.  Between 1999 and 2006 he presented a poetry feature on Kim Hill’s various radio programmes. He has published numerous books of poetry, essays and art criticism, as well as editing numerous anthologies (see New Zealand Book Council website: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/O%27Brien,%20Gregory

Among the exhibitions Greg has curated (many of which have toured extensively) are the following:

Hotere-Out the Black Window  for City Gallery Wellington, 1997.
From the BNZ Art Collection  for City Gallery Wellington, 1998.
McCahon -A view from the Ureweras  for City Gallery Wellington, 1999.
Parihaka -the art of Passive Resistance (with Te Miringa Hohaia and Lara Strongman) for City Gallery Wellington.
John Drawbridge -Wide Open Interior for City Gallery Wellington, 2001.
Peter Black -Real Fiction for City Gallery Wellington, 2002.
Rosalie Gascoigne for City Gallery Wellington, 2004.
Main Trunk Lines -New Zealand Poetry for National Library Gallery, Wellington, 2005 (co-curated with Jenny Bornholdt).
Melvin Day -Continuum for City Gallery Wellington, 2005.

Jane Pountney -wade in the water for City Gallery Wellington 2005.
Noel McKenna -Sheltered Life for City Gallery Wellington.
Elizabeth Thomson -My Hi-Fi My Sci-Fi  for City Gallery Wellington, 2006.
A Nest of Singing Birds -100 Years of the New Zealand School Journal  for National Library Gallery, Wellington, 2007.
Aberhart  for City Gallery Wellington, 2007.
Fiona Hall-Force Field for Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and City Gallery Wellington.
John Pule (co-curated with Aaron Lister) for City Gallery Wellington, opening June this year.

Exhibition developed and curated by Gregory O’Brien in partnership with Exhibition Services Ltd. Assisted by City Gallery Wellington.

Lynley Dodd
Lynley Dodd’s name is synonymous with that unkempt dog, Hairy Maclary.  He’s mischievous and devious, but loveable all the same.  In fact, he’s quite plain and as Dodd explains, he does quite ordinary things.  It is this characteristic that has made Hairy Maclary such a success story.  He’s international, a megastar amongst pooches.  He got a mention on Coronation Street the other month and Tony Blair once read him aloud on BBC television.  Not bad for a backstreet mongrel.

But what do the public know about this quiet and humble Tauranga artist?  Born Lynley Weeks in 1941, she grew up amongst the forests in and around Rotorua.  Her father worked for the New Zealand Forest Service, her mother a homemaker in places so small that Dodd corrected me when I referred to them as small towns.  The largest community consisted of ten houses.

Educated at Iwitahi School and then Tauranga College in the 1950s, Dodd was fortunate to be taught by Claudia Jarman (1908-86), an art teacher who could instill fear and artistic passion at the same time.  Dodd, a private boarder for four of her secondary school years then returned home in 1958 to study her Fine Arts Preliminary through the New Zealand Correspondence School.

The following year, Dodd alongside Don Binney, Michael Smither, Suzanne Goldberg, Greer Twiss, Malcolm Warr and Graham Percy studied at Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland.  A drawing completed on her first day, of a standing female classical plaster of Paris sculpture, is testimony to her ability at observational drawing.  Dodd majored in sculpture, her teachers included: John Kavanagh, Robert Ellis, Peter Brown, Jim Turkington, Jim Allen, John Weeks and Louise Henderson.  Peter Tomory, the Director of Auckland City Art Gallery, took Dodd and fellow students for History of Art and History of Architecture lessons.    Like so many of her generation, Dodd went on to complete a year at Auckland Teachers’ College, under the tutelage of Peter Smith.  Drawings made while teacher training demonstrate her penchant at this early stage for narrative and storybook art.

After teaching at Queen Margaret College, Wellington, for five years, Dodd freelanced for the Correspondence School and Price Milburn, an educational publisher.  Of the work she completed for the New Zealand Correspondence School, Dodd explains that often she was asked to mimic the style of another to continue an existing storyline in the same style.  Not comfortable with this, Dodd set about to cement her own style.  These early images already show what we now know as her stylistic traits – wispy linear renderings of busy animals.  None of the originals survive.  As Dodd tells, ‘original art was kept by the publishers in those days, no one asked for it back, it was made clear that they had purchased the work’.

For a period during the 1970s, as a personal amusement, Dodd drew several cartoons with degrees of success.  Her 1974 cartoon, depicting devouring rodents, won first prize in the National Anti-Litter Campaign Council competition.   Other cartoons considered subjects such as carless days and feminism.

In the mid 1970s Dodd illustrated her first book, My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes.  Still in print four decades later, this book was a collaborative effort with Eve Sutton.  Sutton was keen to write a book but was short of a subject.  Dodd offered the suggestion of the family’s cat whose weakness was hiding in boxes.  Simple.  This gem of a story was the beginning of something huge for Dodd.  What followed were numerous books written and illustrated by her.

Hairy Maclary was created in Lower Hutt.  Married with two young children, Dodd drew, on a pad of lined shopping paper, an airborne scraggly dog with the words written underneath:
One morning at nine,
on his way to the park,
went Hairy Maclary
from Donaldson’s Dairy.

These words were penned in 1979 and though slightly different from the words so familiar to us know, the spirit of Hairy Maclary was thus created. These words would change Dodd’s life forever.

The fame of Hairy Maclary grew from 1983 and has not slowed down.  There’s a gang of animals, all equally quizzical and on the lookout for trouble.  But as Dodd explains, there are happy endings.  Adventures end with good morals.  And for those of us with feet firmly in the real world, there are no elements of fantasy or Harry Potter type moves.  As a writer Dodd has often focused on the underdog.  For example, The Other Ark is a story about the animals that didn’t make the first cut on Noah’s Ark.  Obviously they did not approve of Marmalade Mammoths, sabre-tooth mice or dithering dingbats!  However, the price to pay with this book was that the Americans wouldn’t have a bar of it – especially the Fundamentalists.  It’s done well elsewhere including New Zealand, Australia and Britain.

Hairy Maclary and friends are often based on real animal tales.  Dodd has called on her own experiences as a pet owner numerous times.  And it’s hard not to share stories of animal antics with her.  She admits to receiving much post from readers telling of their animal stories.

Lynley Dodd: A Retrospective is a celebration of Dodd’s work to date.  The first work dates back to school days and the most recent, Shoo (2009).  Dodd works completely by hand, in other words she does not use digital imagining to assist her in any way.  Somewhat nervous about letting her drawings leave her hometown of Tauranga, the drawings on display have not been exhibited previously. Beautifully executed, they are magical pieces of illustration.  Early examples show colour keys for the printer to follow.  Different stages of her process are on exhibition including page layouts and notations with printing instructions.

With all these books under her belt Dodd admits writing and illustrating children’s books is not easy.  She manages about one a year and is quick to correct wannabe writers that it’s an easy task.  Dodd can agonize for days over getting four lines to rhyme.  They have to rhyme, that’s where the magic is.  And it’s the singsong nature of her books that make them stick in our minds even if we haven’t read them for more than a decade.  Dodd hasn’t run out of ideas and says she’ll continue to create her books as long as they keep on coming.  Inspiration comes too from her favourite writers such as Quentin Blake and Dr Seuss.

Dodd has enjoyed various accolades having been the recipient of many awards.  In 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1992 she won the Children’s Picture Book of the Year Award.  In 1999 Dodd was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal.  In 2005 Dodd was made the Children’s Choice Winner – New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children for The Other Ark.

Awarded the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002, Dodd became Dame Lynley Dodd in 2009 as well as being awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Waikato.  In the same year Dodd received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland.

Yet for Dodd success is measured by the love children have for her books.  Over 5 million copies of Hairy Maclary books alone have been printed and sold.  Trademarked to protect his New Zealand identity, Hairy Maclary has been translated into several languages.   This little dog is an international character but it is creator, Lynley Dodd who is the magic behind these stories and this exhibition.

Penelope Jackson, Director Tauranga Art Gallery.

Public Programmes

The exhibition has already been exhibited in Tauranga and Rotorua. It was estimated in Tauranga that up to four schools booked every day, plus they often received unanounced visits from kindergartens and creches.

Lynley Dodd also participated in talks and book signings at both venues. She has indicated that if available and ‘deadline free’, she would be happy to attend public programmes events at venues.

Lynley Dodd – A Retrospective  was developed by Tauranga Art Gallery.

The protagonist of Marian Maguire’s new print series, Titokowaru’s Dilemma, is an impressive figure who embodies the complexities and contradictions of nineteenth-century New Zealand history. T?tokowaru was a trained M?ori tohunga but a Christian convert; an advocate of peace but an outstanding military strategist; a powerful and charismatic leader but one who lost the support of his followers. Rather than simply confusing us, these diverse characteristics offer a more nuanced understanding of T?tokowaru than we might have of more conventional early New Zealanders. And it was this that made him an absorbing subject for Maguire, whose prints exploring colonial history challenge simplistic readings of the past.

Living in the Taranaki district, T?tokowaru was involved in battles against the British in the early 1860s, but then led a number of important initiatives promoting peace with settlers. When continuing land confiscations pushed M?ori into war to avoid starvation, he first resorted to plunder without bloodshed then, in a situation of escalating conflict, deployed an effective combination of fear-provoking propaganda, clever field-engineering and guerrilla tactics to overcome British troops far superior in number to his own. The unexpected dissolution of T?tokowaru’s army in 1869 after a series of victories, reputedly because he undermined his mana by sleeping with the wife of an ally, did not diminish his reputation among settlers as a formidable opponent, and an uneasy peace was maintained. Further land deprivations led to a campaign of passive resistance in which T?tokowaru took part alongside Te Whiti and Tohu. Resistance was finally quashed in a massive show of force by the British at Parihaka in 1881, which decimated M?ori power in the area and saw T?tokowaru imprisoned a number of times before his death in 1888.

In these prints, Maguire continues to develop her distinctive imagery drawn from ancient and colonial sources. The bold silhouettes of Greek vase paintings are particularly evident in her black-and-white etchings, such as those depicting amorous adventures involving Greek gods, M?ori maidens, satyrs and settlers, in a series entitled Colonial Encounters. In the large colour lithographs ofTitokowaru’s Dilemma, figures of similar style and clarity are set into New Zealand landscapes based on colonial paintings and photographs. In Maguire’s intriguing cultural crossovers, we find such unexpected meetings as Socrates in discussion with T?tokowaru, Persephone keeping company with Hine-nui-te-p? in the underworld, and Zeus stalking Papa in a Whangarei landscape. Figures are transposed into unexpected historical settings, with Gustavus von Tempsky dying on the battlefields of Troy, Venus de Milo taken captive in a M?ori p?, and the Christchurch statue of Captain Cook entangled in rata roots in the Taranaki bush. Such intriguing visual inventions continually surprise and delight us, and tease our imaginations with human connections across time.
Presenting T?tokowaru more as a thinking man than a fighter, Maguire frames his story in terms of the kind of questions that Socrates asked – we discover him debating ‘what is virtue?’ with Socrates, or discussing ‘what is peace?’ with his compatriot Te Whiti. The fact that, though pictured against Mount Taranaki, these paired figures mimic the pose of Achilles and Ajax from a famous black-figure vase by the Greek potter and painter Exekias, forges links between New Zealand and ancient Greece, showing that these debates have a timeless significance.

In A Taranaki Dialogue, the enquiry continues in a series of small etchings of the Taranaki landscape, finally focusing on two questions that seem to underpin Maguire’s project as a whole: it is she, as much as Socrates or T?tokowaru, who asks us, ‘what is myth?’ and ‘what is history?’. Elizabeth Rankin 2011

Publication

105 page full colour catalogue with essays and contributions from:
Elizabeth Rankin – Professor of Art History, University of Auckland.
James Belich – Professor of History, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University, Wellington.
Dame Anne Salmond – Distinguished Professor, Maori Studies and Anthropology, University of Auckland.
Keri Hulme – Author, poet, Booker Prize winner and whitebaiter, Okarito.
Dr Giovanni Tiso – Wellington Based Writer, editor, tutor and translator.
Marian Maguire – see below.

Marian Maguire

Born in Christchurch in 1962, Marian Maguire graduated from the Ilam School of Art, University of Canterbury, in 1984, having majored in printmaking. During 1986 she studied at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography, Albuquerque, USA, and alongside making her own work she has pursued a career as a collaborative master printer, in which capacity she has printed the work of some of New Zealand’s leading artists. Maguire set up Limeworks print studio with Stephen Gleeson in 1987 and in 1996 established PaperGraphica print studio and gallery. From 1993 to 1996 she taught printmaking part-time at Ilam School of Art, University of Canterbury. Currently Maguire works almost full-time on her own work.

She was awarded an Artist in Residence at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in 1991 and received an Award for Excellence from the Canterbury Community Trust in 1998. In 2010 she was Artist in Residence at Tylee Cottage, Whanganui.

Marian Maguire has exhibited throughout New Zealand. Her early work was mainly figurative and gestural but in the early nineties she shifted her subject to emblematic images of gates, archways and bridges. Her exhibitions include Library Travelling (McDougall Art Annex, Christchurch, 1996), in which she incorporated imagery from a wide range of historical sources with gates, archways, bridges, architectural plans and imaginary travelling, linking sixty-six small etchings and three large composite prints in a loose narrative. Perfect Planning (Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch 1996; Lesley Kriesler Gallery, New Plymouth, 1997) and Regarding the Renaissance (Centre of Contemporary Art, 1997) followed and in these series of paintings she explores the relationship between the architects of the Italian Renaissance and the art, architecture and mathematics of ancient Greece.

Through this enquiry into Greek art she became interested in black-figure vase painting and produced two exhibitions, Vases & Narratives (Centre of Contemporary Art, 1999) and Mythical Landscapes (Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore, 2000, Centre of Contemporary Art, 2000). In Mythical Landscapes she began to set Greek heroes in the New Zealand landscape. In Southern Myths (PaperGraphica, Christchurch, 2002; Auckland Art Gallery, 2005) she extends this idea into a series of nine etchings threaded on an adapted plotline from the Iliad. Forest, her next exhibition (PaperGraphica, 2003), was an installation of abstracted, geometric trees, inspired by Greek vase painting and painted on loose canvas.

She returned to a narrative theme in The Odyssey of Captain Cook (Otago Museum, Dunedin, 2005; PaperGraphica, 2005; Millennium Art Gallery, Blenheim, 2006; Lopdell House, Titirangi, 2006) and in this series of lithographs and etchings the Endeavour is the vehicle by which the ancient Greeks collide with resident Ma¯????ori. While working on her next narrative print series, The Labours of Herakles, Maguire also made The Paper Garden, in which she combines patterning from Greek vase painting with her own observation of nature (PaperGraphica, 2007), and she contributed to the exhibition of Deities and Mortals, in which eight artists were asked to respond to the items from the Logie Collection of classical artefacts (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2007).

The Labours of Herakles series of lithographs and etchings, in which she casts the Greek hero as a New Zealand pioneer, was first realeased at PaperGraphica in 2008. It has since been on a twenty venue tour throughout New Zealand which finishes October 2012; the tour is organized by Exhibition Services. Half of the Herakles series was also shown at Impact 7: International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking Conference (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia 2011).

Marian Maguire is represented in public collections including: Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa; Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki; Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu; National Gallery of Australia; The Waikato Museum, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato; University of Canterbury, Massey University, The Hocken Collection, University of Otago; New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Central Queensland University, Australia; Cambridge University, United Kingdom; The Birthplace of Captain Cook Museum, Middlesborough, United Kingdom.

1979 Designed and completed a mural, Christchurch Art Centre.
1980-84 BFA, University of Canterbury.
1986 Professional Printer Training Programme, Tamarind Institute of Lithography, Albuquerque, USA.
1987-94 Operated Limeworks Lithography Studio in partnership with Stephen Gleeson.
1987-89 Taught drawing part-time at Christchurch Polytechnic.
1991 External assessor, printmaking, Otago School of Art.
1991-2001 Council member, CSA / COCA.  Chairperson 1996.
1993-96 Taught printmakinG at Ilam Art School, University of Canterbury.  1997 Selector for Telecom Art Awards, Christchurch.
1998 External Assessor, Printmaking Dept., Elam, Auckland University.
2001 Sole Judge of Ashburton Art Society Awards (Art).
2001 Attended ‘In the Region’ Printmaking Symposium at the National Gallery of Australia as a Guest Speaker.
2003 Panel Judge, Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award, an award hosted by the Christchuch Art Gallery.
2007 Sole Judge, Margaret Stoddart Art Award, COCA, Christchurch.
1996-2009 Master printer at PaperGraphica printmaking studio: a workshop specialising in the production of high quality lithographs, woodcuts and etchings in limited editions.
2001-present Gallery operator / curator of PaperGraphica gallery (alongside Nigel Buxton)

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011 Titokowaru’s Dilemma, Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui
2011 Titokowaru’s Dilemma, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2011 Sole exhibitor at Impact 7, International Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking Conference, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
2009 Botanical Studies from an Exploratory Voyage, drawings, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2008 – 2012 The Labours of Herakles tour to twenty galleries in NZ
Venues: Millennium Gallery, Blenheim; Puke Ariki, New Plymouth; Aratoi,
Masterton; Hastings Art Gallery; Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui; Adam Art
Gallery, Wellington; Percy Thomson Gallery, Stratford; Lopdell House, Titirangi; Hocken Library, Dunedin; Forrester Gallery, Oamaru; Southland Museum, Invercargill; Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore; Ashburton Art Gallery; Aigantighe Gallery, Timaru; Tairawhiti Museum, Gisborne; Waikato Museum, Hamilton; Te Manawa, Palmerston North; Tauranga Art Gallery, Waikato Museum.
2008 The Labours of Herakles, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2008 The Odyssey of Captain Cook, Captain Cook Birthplace Museum, Marton, Middlesborough, United Kingdom.
2007 The Paper Garden, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2006 The Odyssey of Captain Cook, Lopdell House Gallery, Titirangi
2006 The Odyssey of Captain Cook, Millennium Art Gallery, Blenheim
2005 Flow Diagrams paintings, Whitespace, Auckland
2005 The Odyssey of Captain Cook, Otago Museum
2005 The Odyssey of Captain Cook, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2005 Southern Myths, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki
2004 Flow Diagrams, woodcuts, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2004 FOREST,  Lesley Kreisler Gallery, New Plymouth.
2004 Paintings and lithographs, Carrick Winery, Otago.
2003 FOREST,  PaperGraphica, Christchurch.
2003 New Paintings, Whitespace, Auckland.
2003 Southern Myths, Ashburton Art Gallery.
2002 Amphora, Port Gallery, Port Chalmers, Dunedin.
2002 New etchings and lithographs, PaperGraphica, Christchurch.
2000 Mythical Landscapes, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch
2000 Mythical Landscapes, Eastern Southland Art Gallery.
1999 Vases & Narratives, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch.
1997 Regarding the Renaissance, COCA, Christchurch.
1997 Perfect Planning, Lesley Kreisler Gallery, New Plymouth.
1996 Perfect Planning, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch.
1996 Library Travelling, McDougall Art Annex, Christchurch.
1995 Gates Archways Bridges, CSA Gallery, Christchurch.
1995 The Lane Gallery, Auckland.
1993 The Lane Gallery, Auckland.
1993 Aero Club Gallery, Port Chalmers, Dunedin.
1992 No. 5 Gallery, Dunedin.
1992 Aero Club Gallery, Port Chalmers, Dunedin.
1992 Canterbury Gallery, Christchurch.
1992 33 1/3 Gallery, Wellington.
1991 33 1/3 Gallery, Wellington.
1990 Canterbury Gallery, Christchurch.
1989 33 1/3 Gallery, Wellington.
1985 Coarse Grain / Fine Cut, Marshall Seifert Gallery, Dunedin.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2010 Christmas Exhibition, new prints, PaperGraphica, Christchurch
2010 Walking the Line, drawing exhibition, Bartley+Company Art, Wgtn.
2010 Call Waiting: A Celebration of the NEW Gallery 1995-2011
Auckland Art Gallery, NEW Gallery
2010 Back & Beyond & Here, New Zealand Art for the Young & Curious
Museum of Wellington City and Sea
2009 The Captain, Tauranga Art Gallery, Toi Tauranga
2009 Sanboa International Printmaking Exhibition, Jingdezhen, China.
2009 Picturing History: Goldie to Cotton, Auckland Art Gallery
2009 Stuart Duffin, Kelvin Mann, Marian Maguire, Solander Gallery, Wellington. Includes Maguire’s drawings Botanical Studies from an Exploratory Voyage.
2008 Our Space, The Wall, Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand
Images from The Odyssey of Captain Cook included in an electronic, interactive exhibition, 2008 – 2020.
2008 Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition, Sofa Gallery, Christchurch.
An exhibition convened by the Uni of Canterbury School of Fine Arts.
2008 Keeping Time, Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu
2007 ‘Art School 125′ 125 Years of the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu
2007 of Deities and Mortals, 8 artists respond to artifacts from the Logie Collection, Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu
2007 Pakeha Now!  The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson
2005 Considering Mondrian, PaperGraphica, Millennium Art Gallery;
Blenheim; Eastern Southland Art Gallery, Gore (2006).
2003 WARSHOW, PaperGraphica, Christchurch.
1998 Picturing History, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch.
1992 Prospect Canterbury, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch.
1993 Print and Paper Exhibition, Kurashiki Public Gallery,Kurashiki, Japan.  1993 White Camelias, Suffrage Exhibition, Robert McDougall Art Gallery.
1993 Women’s Art from the North and South Island, The Suter, Nelson
1993 New Zealand Women Printmakers, Exhibition toured by Zonta.
1987 with Sue Cooke and Ralph Hotere, Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
1985 with Sue Cooke and Ralph Hotere, RKS Art, Auckland.

AWARDS
2010 Artist in Residence, Tylee Cottage. An award supported by the Sargeant Gallery, Whanganui, NZ
1998 Arts Excellence Award, The Canterbury Community Trust.
1991 Artist in Residence, Otago Polytechnic. An award funded by the QEII Arts Council.
1984 Seager Prize in drawing, Ilam School of Art.

COLLECTIONS
Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand
National Library Collection, New Zealand
Central Queensland University, Australia
Nelson Polytechnic, New Zealand
Christchurch College of Education, New Zealand
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Lincoln University, New Zealand
National Bank, New Zealand
Canterbury Public Library, New Zealand
New Zealand Parliament Buildings
National Gallery of Australia
Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand
Massey University, New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand
The Waikato Museum, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Cambridge University, United Kingdom
The Captain Cook Birthplace Museum, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom
Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, Jingdezhen, China
Hocken Library Collection, Otago University, Dunedin
Victoria University of Wellington
Dunedin Public Art Gallery

CATALOGUES AND BOOKS
Titokowaru’s Dilemma, by Marian Maguire, with contributions from Elizabeth Rankin, James Belich, Giovanni Tiso, Anne Salmond and Keri Hulme, PaperGraphica 2011.
The Labours of Herakles, by Marian Maguire, with essays by Elizabeth Rankin and Patrick O’Sullivan, PaperGraphica 2008
The Odyssey of Captain Cook by Marian Maguire, essay by Anna Smith, PaperGraphica 2005
The Odyssey adapted, by Marian Maguire, limited edition, hand-bound book, PaperGraphica 2006
The Iliad abbreviated, by Marian Maguire, limited edition book, PaperGraphica 2003

BOOK COVERS
Striding Both Worlds: Witi Ihimaera and New Zealand’s Literary Traditions by Melissa Kennedy.
Rodopi, The Netherlands – New York, 2011. Cover image.
The Snake-Haired Muse: James K. Baxter and Classical Myth by Geoffrey Miles, John Davidson and Paul Millar. Victoria University Press, 2011. Cover image plus 3 plates.
Lost Relatives, poems by Siobahn Harvey, Steele Roberts, 2011. Cover image. Victoria University of Wellington, 2011 Calender. Cover image.
Ithaca Island Bay Leaves, poems by Vana Manasiadis, Seraph Press 2009. Cover image.
Lis Penden’ in International Litigation, by Campbell McLachlan, Martinus Nijhoff 2009. Cover image.
Architecture NZ, no. 6, 2008. Cover illustration.

Publications, review, blogs with reference to Maguire as an artist;
ARTiculate (video 2011) – a documentary project made in response to the 2010/11 earthquakes by Canterbury Arts & Heritage Trust. http://www.articulate.org.nz
Critical Mass: Printmaking Beyond the Edge, by Richard Noyce, A&C Black (London), 2010.
Sanboa International Printmaking Exhibition, catalogue, Jingdezhen, China.
Back & Beyond & Here. Group exhibition catalogue (related to Gregory O’Brien’s Back and Beyond, 2010, Museum of Wellington City and Sea.
Giovanni Tiso, The Labours of Herakles, 2009.
http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html
Adrienne Rewi  Ancient Greece meets Indigenous New Zealand 2009
http://grhomeboy.wordpress.com/2006/07/12/ancient-greece-meets-indigenous-new-zealand/
A new take on our colonial history, article by Adam Gifford. The Herald newspaper, 20.2.10.
The Art of History, article by Jackie Bowring on b.passages.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
2008 Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition catalogue, University of Canterbury.
Postcards, review by Sally Blundell in Art News, Spring 2008.
Herculean NZ, article by Rosa Shiels in the Christchurch Press 11.6.08.
Back & Beyond, New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious by Gregory O’Brien, Auckland University Press, 2008.
Pakeha Now! exhibition catalogue, The Bishop Suter Art Gallery, 2007
Time Flowing Backwards, review by Bridie Lonie. The Listener Sept 2005, Vol 200, no.3410
Of Deities or Mortals, exhibition catalogue, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2005.
Achilles and Ajax in Aotearoa: Marian Maguire’s Southern Myths, article by Elizabeth Rankin, Art New Zealand 118, 2006.
White Camelias, exhibition catalogue, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, 1993

Publications with reference to Maguire as a collaborative printmaker
Printmaking at PaperGraphica, a collaborative fine print studio in New Zealand, article by Elizabeth Rankin, Grapheion 19,  2006, International review of contemporary prints, book and paper art.
Empty of shadows and making a shadow, lithographs by Ralph Hotere, Essays by Peter Vangioni and Jillian Cassidy, introduction  Marian Maguire. Christchurch Art Gallery, 2005.
Islands in the Sun, edited by Roger Butler, Australian National Gallery, 2001.
Crossing the Divide: a painter makes prints, Gretchen Albrecht, edited by James Ross, essay Anne Kirker, Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, 1999.
Limeworks Studio, article by John Daly-Peoples, Art New Zealand 55, 1990.   Lasting Impressions, Lithography as Art, edited by Pat Gilmour, Australian National Gallery 1988.
Contemporary New Zealand Prints, edited by Jill MacIntosh, Allen & Unwin / Port Nicholson Press in association with Wellington City Art Gallery 1989.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“The images highlight the strength of human-to-human connections and how this deeply personal contact is essential in the exchange of facial moko. They signify how unity in the world is impossible if we do not celebrate who we are and are confined to judging each other by face value alone”

I started the Face Value project in 2000 after a year of traveling and photographing a number of cultural social documentary stories. One of my aims was to counteract the fascination held by the international media and popular culture with stereotypical portrayals of M????ori wearing ‘fierce’ facial tattoo that repeatedly highlighted a public misrepresentation of the art form.

I was not interested in the generic context of moko, nor in the history or politics of the process. I am neither an anthropologist nor an academic specializing in such things. My intention was to find out what the traditional facial tattoo meant to the individual and how it came about in this fast changing world.

These images are personal, with each person sharing their knowledge pertaining to their experience with the moko. This is not a body of work that covers the whole M????ori perspective of facial moko. It is about six personal stories presented exactly as they are.

I have discovered that there are political and cultural issues attached to the idea of what moko is today, and the points of view are varied depending on age, gender, tribal affiliation, knowledge and personal experience.

The subjects did not choose to discuss regional differences, political acts or approval from elders. We talked about the experience within their own process – each uniquely personal and special.

The work is about the relationship between the artist and the recipient; it is about the individual’s connection to their own personal reasons for taking on the facial moko.

I have spent eight years working closely with the people featured and with many others. I feel reassured that they all appreciate how their stories are represented. This has been achieved by building trust, taking time and paying attention to detail in the communication process and by the mutual respect that developed. It was a great privilege to be able to photograph and film these events.

Serena Stevenson February 2009

Face Value is an artist initiated project, supported by Pataka Museum of Arts & Cultures. 

Film installation.

The 37 minute film runs on a loop with each of the six stories as self-contained ‘chapters’, so the audience can choose to be up close and personal with one or all of the stories. The concept for this is that the stories are preserved as being personal and intimate unlike the conventional way of viewing a full length film in a cinema. Music is an integral element connecting each story.

The representation of the relationships and art of moko from a personal perspective aims to be informative, enlightening, and intimate. Gaining a new experience is the potential outcome for the viewer, depending on their own connection to family, identity and human connection.

Each of the six stories has an individual personality so the music has been chosen to carry each story and to reflect the character of each. The style of the moving and stills imagery has been paced to faithfully represent the person, their relationship to the moko and the connection between the artist and recipient.

Unique to the film is contemporay footage of facial moko being carried out using traditional tools and technique.

Publication

An eight page foldout brochure accompanies the exhibition. These will be provided free of charge and distributed equally amongst participating venues.

Public Programmes

Serena Stevenson is available to talk at galleries about her eight year project. She has also offered to help arrange individuals featured in the film installation to participate if requested.

The Voyage

In May 2011 the Kermadec Initiative of the Pew Environment Group invited nine artists to join them on a voyage through the Kermadec region of New Zealand to Tonga. The Kermadec Islands are the most remote part of New Zealand. Despite their natural and historical significance, our awareness of the islands and surrounding waters is slight.
The exhibition Kermadec – Lines in the Ocean celebrates the artists’ journey to one of the last great ocean wilderness areas on the planet and shines a spotlight on the extraordinary and special features that define the Kermadec region and connect us to the Pacific. The exhibition presents some of the key works produced by the artists since the voyage. These works reflect a wide range of approaches and responses, as well as using a range of media including video, tapa-making, painting, photography, etching, film, sound-recording and poetry.

Kermadec – Lines in the Ocean

‘Kermadec – Lines in the Ocean’ captures the diversity of the art produced as part of the ‘Kermadec’ project. It also offers a sense of the originating experience through documentary film and photographs. The exhibition answers the question how contemporary art might engage with, and raise issues concerning, the environment.  As the works in the exhibition attest, the voyage  proved a challenge, but was ultimately a formative and profound influence on all the artists. The voyage has not only become a galvanising and radical component in the creative lives of each, it has also fueled an ongoing engagement in their work with notions of the pristine, the pure and the beautiful. Accordingly, the exhibition is a many-layered meditation on Nature and how the human mind and physical body experience it.
‘Kermadec—Lines in the Ocean’ brings together works by nine mid-career to senior artists—eight of them based in New Zealand, one based in Australia. Using a  diverse range of materials and approaches, they bring radically different sensibilities to bear on the shared originating experience. While John Reynolds portrays the seabound experience with splashes of expressionist blue paint, Robin White uses the materials and techniques of Tongan tapa-making to create a formal and conceptual bridge between Aotearoa/New Zealand and our Pacific neighbours in the north. Systems of mapping and recording are explored in the drawings of Gregory O’Brien, while his paintings explore notions of ‘landfall’ and the transition between human and non-human worlds. Elizabeth Thomson’s works using zinc, glass beads and photographic source materials offer a sense of the transcendent beauty and power of the Kermadec reality. Ideas about nature, and humanity’s place in it are at the heart of John Pule’s paintings and the etchings he has produced in collaboration with O’Brien. Photo-artist/film-maker Bruce Foster explores the impact of human industry on the natural environment across the whole Pacific, bringing Easter Island as well as Raoul Island into focus. Like all the artists, photographer Jason O’Hara confronts the creative problem of how you make art about something that lies beyond the bounds of humanity’s usual habitat and headspace. Going off the map of the known requires the making of new maps, new ways of thinking and seeing; it requires symbols, allegories and the making of subconscious connections. Therein lie the narratives of discovery and enlightenment that are at the heart of these works: the ‘lines in the ocean’ that show us where we have been, where we are and where we think we might be going.

A note on the project

‘Kermadec—lines in the ocean’ has been already shown at two venues internationally. In May it opened at the New Zealand High Commission in Nuku’alofa, Tonga. It then toured to Easter Island / Rapa Nui.A sense of its impact at the latter location is captured in Bruce Foster’s short film, ‘Kermadec—Rapanui’, which can be viewed here:
http://vimeo.com/46988031
Images of the exhibition, as hung in Nuku’alofa, can be viewed here:
http://www.thekermadecs.org/news-and-blogs/news/artists-bring-kermadecs-to-tonga
Bruce Foster’s short film of the Kermadec voyage can be viewed here:http://vimeo.com/37186027

The exhibition ‘Kermadec—lines in the ocean’ differs significantly from the exhibition ‘Kermadec’ at City Gallery Wellington October 2012-February 2013. While it features a number of the same video-works, photographs and etchings, it comprises a number of works completed since the larger show opened at Tauranga Art Gallery last November. ‘Kermadec—lines in the ocean’ is more compact in scale and is more suited to a national tour. As the showings in Tonga and on Easter Island proved, however, it is a rich and diverse exhibition on its own terms. It features a strong and persuasive body of work, many of which have been key iconic pieces in the broader ‘Kermadec’ project.

The larger ‘Kermadec’ exhibition will not be shown in New Zealand again. It opens at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago, Chile, in March. It will then, in all likelihood, tour elsewhere internationally.

The response to the Kermadec project has been remarkable. It has reached far beyond the Fine Arts audience to engage with anyone interested in the environment, cultural history, maritime history and many other areas. Some responses can be found here:
http://www.thekermadecs.org/articles 
A review of the main exhibition is on the ‘Mindfood’ website: http://www.mindfood.com/at-the-kermadec-initiative-art-gallery.seo

The Artists

Extensive notes on each of the nine artists can be accessed here:
http://www.thekermadecs.org/kermadec-nine-artists-in-the-south-pacific 
Each artist has contributed reflections on the voyage here:
http://www.thekermadecs.org/encounters 
Biographical details are here:
http://www.thekermadecs.org/artists-profiles

The Kermadec Initiative

Seventy- one percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean. Less than one percent of that blue surface if fully protected. The Kermadec Initiative, a project of the Pew Environment Group and its New Zealand partners WWF NZ and Forest and Bird, is focused on securing the creation of a fully no take Ocean Sanctuary that will safeguard the Kermadecs marine environment. They are doing so in collaboration with iwi, scientists, government, artists, institutions and community organisations. If designated a Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary will become the newest and one of the largest of a new generation of spectacular marine parks around the world.

Introduction

The term propaganda derives from the name given to a 17th-century Committee of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, Congregatio de Propaganda de Fide, which was charged with directing ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines propaganda as the ‘systematic propagation of information or ideas to encourage or instil a particular attitude or response’.

This remarkable selection of propaganda posters exemplifies the above definition. The posters were collected by the late Dr WB Sutch, a New Zealander whose work for the government in the 1930s took him to Europe as the events depicted in these posters were unfolding.

The use of posters as propaganda tools had come of age during the First World War. Their aim was essentially two-fold: in Britain, to encourage male recruitment – a famous and frequently adapted example being Lord Kitchener’s ‘Your country needs you’ – and in all major participating countries to inspire home front support for the war. Posters were cheap to produce, easy to distribute, and could immediately respond to wartime events. They continued to be employed by governments of the 1930s and 1940s who believed in their effectiveness.

Towards the Precipice presents Spanish, German, British and Soviet posters from the period 1935 to 1942. They represent the voice of Republican opposition to the right-wing Nationalist forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. The Nazi regime used posters to win ordinary Germans over to their world view by showing them, and the world, the promised material advantages of belonging to Hitler’s Germany. The British posters cover the early years of the Second World War and build upon the generally accepted idea that the war was both just and necessary to defend traditional British values. The Soviet posters were designed following Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. They were later adapted by the British to reinforce the resulting Anglo-Soviet alliance against Hitler.

These posters present their views in a way that is both overtly manipulative and stunningly simple when compared to the methods and media that are used to influence public opinion today.

The exhibition title, Towards the Precipice, is taken from New Zealander Geoffrey Cox’s book Countdown to War: a personal memoir of Europe, 1938-1940.

Bill Sutch

William Ball Sutch was born in England in 1907 and arrived in New Zealand with his family when eight months old. Both his parents were staunch Methodists, independent minded and widely read in the social fields.

Sutch trained as a teacher and graduated MA and B.Com from Victoria University. A fellowship took him to Columbia University in 1932 where he undertook a Ph.D on the topic of ‘Price fixing in New Zealand’. He returned to New Zealand after travelling widely in North America and Europe, to a country in the depths of the depression. This experience was fundamental to his subsequent thinking on economics and social policy.

Over the next 40 years he held a wide variety of influential government and diplomatic positions, including groundbreaking work with Unicef and other UN agencies. He published widely and maintained an active role in the cultural life of New Zealand, culminating in his appointment to the Chair of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council in 1973. Bill Sutch is also remembered for being tried and acquitted under the Official Secrets Act.

Economist Brian Easton describes Sutch’s writing as providing ‘one of the most comprehensive accounts of, and visions for, New Zealand. He was a nation-builder who wanted to see an economically strong and socially fair New Zealand, free from colonial ties, whether political or cultural.’

William Sutch died in 1975.

Towards the Precipice was curated and developed by the National Library of New Zealand

Having arrived via the Endeavour during Maguire’s series, ‘The Odyssey of Captain Cook‘, the ancient Greeks resolve to settle the New Land. In this collection of twelve lithographs and eight etchings, the archetypal hero is cast as New Zealand colonist.

His objective: to claim and tame the land. But the process is unsettling.

Maguire’s Odyssey of Captain Cook was a play between three cultures: Maori at the moment of contact with Europe; ancient Greece, cited as western civilisation’s source; and the Britain of Captain Cook’s era, ‘The Age of Enlightenment’, a time of renewed interest in Classical thought and style. The West having arrived the next step was to colonise.

“Herakles, or Hercules as the Romans knew him, the embodiment of courage and strength of classical legend, has crossed the seas of time to transform the New World for those who would follow… Whether he is clearing forests and felling trees, battling with Maori warriors, writing letters home from Taranaki, or standing up to be counted at Gallipoli, Herakles appears as well focused on the tasks at hand as he was confronting the 12 Labours requested by King Eurystheus of Tiryns . . . killing the monstrous Nemean Lion, capturing the Cerynian Hind, cleaning the Augean Stables and so on… [Maguire] has combined authoritative borrowings and reworkings of earlier images – historical lithographs, pre-colonial drawings, old photographs, and the art and text of classical vases – to present layer upon layer of detailed myth and meaning, reference and allusion, appropriation and reinterpretation.

The lithographs in The Labours of Herakles exhibition are an elegant and often humorous union of the ancient and the colonial: of Herakles wrestling not a minotaur or a lion but a taniwha; of the Amazons as suffragettes; of Athena scolding him for his lack of progress; of Herakles trying to construct a chariot from No. 8 wire.”   excerpted from an article by Rosa Shiels (The Press, Christchurch, NZ, June 11, 2008).

Herakles was no Odysseus, no leader of men. Wise and resourceful Odysseus, like James Cook, captained his ship intelligently, he made decisions for both himself and his oarsmen. Herakles, clad in lion-skin and wielding his club, displays other characteristics. He is strong, persistent, resilient. He never led an army, he worked alone. Set a challenge he will do his absolute utmost to see the task successfully completed without, for a moment, questioning the rights or wrongs of the instruction. The qualities Herakles displays – strength, patience, invention, fortitude – would have advantaged any pioneer tasked with transforming this country.

In ‘The Labours of Herakles’ Maguire casts him as New Zealand pioneer but unlike the hero of classical mythology Maguire’s Herakles is not always successful. Despite his considerable physical ability, the hugeness of the task ahead at times dismays him. He makes mistakes, he is set upon by doubt. The Arcadia of his dream is within no easy reach and while, for the most part, he can reflect upon his labours with a pride, his satisfaction is tinged with discomfort.

Marion Maguire

Born in Christchurch in 1962, Marian Maguire graduated from the Ilam School of Art, University of Canterbury, in 1984, having majored in printmaking. During 1986 she studied at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography, Albuquerque, USA, and alongside making her own work she has pursued a career as a collaborative master printer, in which capacity she has printed the work of some of New Zealand’s leading artists. Maguire set up Limeworks print studio with Stephen Gleeson in 1987 and in 1996 established PaperGraphica print studio and gallery. From 1993 to 1996 she taught printmaking part-time at Ilam School of Art, University of Canterbury. She was awarded an Artist in Residence at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in 1991 and received an Award for Excellence from the Canterbury Community Trust in 1998.

Marian Maguire has exhibited throughout New Zealand. Her early work was mainly figurative and gestural but in the early nineties she shifted her subject to emblematic images of gates, archways and bridges. Her exhibitions include Library Travelling (McDougall Art Annex, Christchurch, 1996), in which she incorporated imagery from a wide range of historical sources with gates, archways, bridges, architectural plans and imaginary travelling, linking sixty six small etchings and three large composite prints in a loose narrative. Perfect Planning (Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch 1996; Lesley Kriesler Gallery, New Plymouth, 1997) and Regarding the Renaissance (Centre of Contemporary Art 1997) followed and in these series of paintings she explores the relationship between the architects of the Italian rRenaissance and the art, architecture and mathematics of ancient Greece.

Through this enquiry into Greek art she became interested in black- figure vase painting and producesd two exhibitions, Vases & Narratives (Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch 1999) and Mythical Landscapes (Eastern Southland Art Gallery, Gore, 2000, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, 2000). In Mythical Landscapes she beganins to set Greek heroes in the New Zealand landscape. In Southern Myths (PaperGraphica, Christchurch, 2002; Auckland Art Gallery, 2005) she extends this idea into a series of nine etchings threaded on an adapted plot line from The Iliad. Forest, her next exhibition (PaperGraphica, 2003), was an installation of abstracted, geometric trees, inspired by Greek vase painting and painted on loose canvas. She returneds to a narrative theme in The Odyssey of Captain Cook (Otago Museum, Dunedin, 2005;, PaperGraphica, 2005;, Millennium Art Gallery, Blenheim, 2006;, Lopdell House, Titirangi, 2006) and in this series of lithographs and etchings the Endeavour is the vehicle by which the ancient Greeks collide with resident Maori. While working on the current series Maguire also made The Paper Garden, in which she combines patterning from Greek vase painting with her own observation of nature (PaperGraphica, 2007), and she contributed to the exhibition of Deities and Mortals, in which eight artists were asked to respond to the items from the Logie Collection of classical artefacts (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2007).

Marian Maguire is represented in public collections including: Te Papa Taongawera, Museum of New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki; Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu; National Gallery of Australia; The Waikato Museum, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato; University of Canterbury, Massey University, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Central Queensland University, Australia; Cambridge University, United Kingdom; The Birthplace of Captain Cook Museum, Middlesborough, United Kingdom.

More than half of the world’s Muslims live in Asia. Southeast Asia alone is home to as many Muslims as the entire Arabic-speaking Middle East, and Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population.

The Muslims whose thoughts and portraits appear in this exhibition represent many strands of Asian experience that have converged in New Zealand. Some are recent immigrants, many other voices in the exhibition speak as Kiwi-born. All express an emergent indigenous Islam in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the making of ‘The Crescent Moon’ renowned photographer Ans Westra and writer Adrienne Jansen traveled through the country, catching up with people in their everyday lives. They met a very diverse group, ethnically, culturally, and theologically. There are lawyers and farmers, computer trainers and butchers, fourth generation New Zealanders and new migrants. They talk with disarming honesty and humour about the media, about identity, about their faith – but mostly they just talk about their lives as Muslims in New Zealand.

The fateful 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the subsequent invasion of Iraq laid the groundwork for the emergence of the militant fundamentalist group Islamic State which has wrought such havoc around the world. Today ordinary peace-loving Muslims face unusual challenges in finding acceptance and mutual respect based on understanding. The Crescent Moon: the Asian Face of Islam in New Zealand is designed to further that understanding.

It provides a captivating and often surprising insight into the lives of our Muslim community – who have been an intrinsic part of New Zealand’s population makeup since the first Muslim Chinese gold miners landed on these distant shores over 130 years ago.

The exhibition has been developed by the Asia New Zealand Foundation

An Asia NZ Foundation Project. Photographs by Ans Westra. Text by Adrienne Jansen.

Publication.
The exhibition is complemented by a comprehensive 95 page publication which includes an introduction by the Governor General, The Hon Anand Satyanand, and a foreword by Dr Anna Gade, lecturer in Religious Studies at Victoria University.

This beautifully produced book offers frank and vivid snapshots of the lives of 37 Muslims of Asian descent. Stunning portraits by Ans Westra bring to life personal stories of business, boxing, painting, politics, love and faith (plus where to buy the best halal sausages!) shared with writer Adrienne Jansen.

Published by the Asia New Zealand Foundation, the book will be launched to coincide with the opening of ‘The Crescent Moon’ at Pataka Museum.

Ans Westra was born in the Netherlands and came to New Zealand as a young adult. She has recorded much of the country’s social history in a career in documentary photography spanning almost fifty years. In 1998 she was awarded the Companion of the Order of New Zealand Merit for services to photography and in 2007 she became an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon artist. Her most recent major exhibition, Handboek:Ans Westra, toured widely. She lives in Wellington.

Adrienne Jansen has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and in particular has worked alongside immigrants to record their experiences. A long-time teacher of English to new migrants, she was co-founder of one of the first home tutoring language programmes in New Zealand. In 1993 she established the creative writing programme at Whitireia Community Polytechnic. She works as a writer at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa, and teaches creative writing. She and her family live in Wellington.

The Crescent Moon has been developed by the Asia New Zealand Foundation. www.asianz.org.nz  Contacts: Jennifer King on 04 471 2320.

For information regarding the exhibition tour, contact Exhibition Services Ltd.

The Exhibition
‘Bohemians of the Brush; Pumpkin Cottage Impressionists’ will tell the little-known story of how James Nairn united modern artists from throughout the country in the 1890s and helped redefine New Zealand painting.  The exhibition will bring alive New Zealand’s most famous artists’ retreat, the legendary Pumpkin Cottage at Silverstream.

The exhibition will present about thirty plein-air and impressionist paintings drawn from Expressions Arts and Entertainment Centre’s Pumpkin Cottage Paintings Collection, and from public and private collections. Artists will include James Nairn, Mabel Hill, John Baillie, George Butler, Mary Elizabeth Tripe, Frances Hodgkins, Girolamo Nerli and their followers Fred Sedgwick, Edward Fristrom and Nugent Welch.  Their bright and painterly images of intimate and honest moments in time also capture the characteristic colours of the New Zealand landscape.

Nairn led the New Zealand movement towards impressionism as these artists rebelled against the insincerity of the dominant romantic landscape imagery, popularised by John Gully’s grand paintings of such as Mitre Peak. The exhibition will also convey through contemporary quotes, poetry, photographs and music how bohemian the artists at Pumpkin Cottage and the rebel Wellington Art Club exhibitions were regarded at the time.

Proposed content
Approximately 30 impressionist and plein-air works & contextual graphic panels generously illustrated with photographs of the artists and the key locations.

Presentation
Introductory panel, illustrated thematic graphic panels, and individual work labels. Thematic segments include;

• Setting the scene – arcadia at Silverstream – includes prior history of the cottage.
• Bohemian life at Pumpkin Cottage – introducing the creative intellectuals, including their literary and musical interests.
• Their modern plein air and impressionist response to the landscape.
• Rebel exhibitions and politics – Wellington Art Club’s artists and their critics battle it out on a national stage.
• Proving they could draw – portraiture.
• Leaving an impression – the legend of Pumpkin Cottage.

Ephemera including a model of Pumpkin Cottage by Nicole Cosgrove, Weta Workshop.

Audio Visual
A high quality DVD made by Provid Ltd. containing an interview with Ernest Cosgrove and Jane Vial will also include images of paintings, photographs, and music of the period. Duration approximately 15 minutes.

Publication
A catalogue illustrating all works in the exhibition is envisaged.

Exhibition Curator
Art historian and curator Jane Vial, a specialist in the New Zealand impressionist movement, has broad experience researching and interpreting New Zealand art. She began her career at Aigantighe Art Gallery and later work included exhibitions officer at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, curator of exhibitions and acting director at Te Manawa, research assistant at the old National Gallery, and image researcher at the Museum of New Zealand Project. She was also an assistant lecturer in Art History at Victoria University while writing her Masters thesis there on the Australasian impressionist movement. From 1998 she led an EU-funded carriage museum project in Co Sligo, Ireland and in 2002 was director of the Millennium Art Gallery before setting up Blenheim-based curatorial consultancy Art & Heritage Services. Recent projects include curating the 2008 International Festival of the Arts exhibition From Fretful sleeper to art world giant; the Gallery of Helen Hitchings for the Museum of Wellington and Painters of Light for the Suter, contributing essays to the 2009 book Art at Te Papa, and lecturing on New Zealand Impressionism at Te Papa during the recent Monet exhibition.

Exhibition Support
“This is a convincing proposal for a visually coherent exhibition with strong local and regional interest that promises to deliver on curatorial integrity (from Jane Vial’s authority on this period in New Zealand art history) while holding broad audience appeal (given the popularity of Impressionist and plein-air painting). I’m struck by visual resonances with the paintings of the Heidelberg School, near Melbourne, of much the same period, that had not occurred to me before I saw this proposal.” Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Professor of Fine Arts and Head of School, Elam School of Fine Arts, NICAI

“I expect Bohemians of the Brush to have broad appeal – partly because of the ‘romantic’ notion of the Bohemian artists’ colony, but also the freshness and vibrancy of the works. Although the artists congregated at Pumpkin Cottage, they actually painted in various locations throughout New Zealand. Pumpkin Cottage was like a hub and perhaps akin, for its time, to the Christchurch Group which formed in 1927 – that resulted in the next generations’ approach to the New Zealand landscape. The exhibition would provide galleries with a readymade and very coherent show – but also one which could lead to a look and reassessment of their own holdings of NZ works in the Impressionist mode.” Julie Catchpole, Director, The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatu

“Jane has curated two highly successful but different exhibition projects for the Museum of Wellington City & Sea. Jane brings a strong background in quality research, provides a keen sense of understanding what a visitor enjoys and learns from and adds a spice of fun and entertainment in what she curates.” Brett Mason, Director, Museums Wellington.

Bohemians of the Brush is a touring exhibition proposal from Expressions Arts and Entertainment Centre, Upper Hutt.

In Ey! Iran, social realities of hope, temptation, nostalgia and introspection are captured through the Persian lens. The exhibition depicts a culture surprisingly familiar to ours – narratives of family life, suburban sprawl and poignant observations on a country immersed in longstanding customs and traditions. The artists take on issues of identity, gender and social restrictions and by doing so capture a side of Iran which is often contrary to that presented by the Pentagon and the western media.

The exhibition is a Gold Coast City Art Gallery initiative. Gallery curator Mandana Mapar was born in Iran, raised in New Zealand and is now based in Queensland. She has drawn together 18 photo media artists for this project, most of whom still live and work in Iran (although many exhibit widely overseas).

Below are the opening speech notes from Anne Kirker at the Gold Coast City
Art Gallery late 2006.

Ey! Iran

This exhibition is opportunistic. But not in the way you might think. It is not jumping on the back of daily news coverage of areas of war and devastation in the Middle East (that disparate entity of over 20 different sovereign states spread over three continents), but rather, this exhibition is opportunistic in using the expertise and intimate knowledge of Mandana Mapar. Although she has spent most of her life in either NZ or Australia she has keep alive her links with Tehran and elsewhere in Iran. Who better to curate a survey in tandem with a Tehran based colleague for Australasian audiences?

The show is also opportunistic in a further positive sense in that it allows us to see at first hand what contemporary Iranian photography is like as is emerges from within that culture, not at one remove. Although most of the photographers and filmmakers represented here have travelled and exhibited extensively outside of their country, most were trained in photography at Tehran’s Azard University and their imagery (which is produced in Iran) is not stereotypically Persian. By this I mean that Mandana and her colleague have chosen photomedia images that do not necessarily cater to popular expectations. It is non-conformist and challenging.

Western viewers often slip into binary definitions (such as east versus west, tradition versus modern and so forth) when confronting art from non-European cultures. However, globalization has upturned such simplistic distinctions and when you view this exhibition you are immediately struck by similarities with what occurs elsewhere in creative photography. The same processes, stylistic conventions and subjects are reflected here. What does distinguish these photographs by senior, mid-career and emerging practitioners are the subtle references to social realities in contemporary Iran, the coding of a culture that is different from our own here and the emphasis on individual identity through self-portraiture.

One can gauge an active curatorial involvement and passion in the project rather than one that is politically correct. There are for instance 4 female exhibitors and the rest are male. Yet, it is the quality of the photographs in formal and conceptual terms that has been of paramount concern to Mandana. When she traveled to Tehran in June to view and select images she wanted to choose imagery that was open and adventurous. Obviously, if more women artists had been located who demonstrated high calibre in their work they would have been included.

Ironically, the one photographer from Iran who immediately sprung to my mind before I previewed Ey! Iran was Shirin Neshat who has developed in international career from her base in New York. She takes Islam and gender as a core concern in her work, creating imposing scenarios. Although marvelous there is a slight nagging feeling that her imagery is essentialist and suits the western preoccupation with exoticism and the “Other”.

By comparison, this show is much more about living in urban Iran today, and how globalisation works in breaking down barriers and distinctions. Globalisation has obviously brought western-originating impulses, in the broad range of photographic techniques alone. It is also witnessed at the start of the exhibition in the dark room where a film by Amirali Ghasemi shows Tehran at night with is neon signs overlapping in Farsi and English. Daily immersion in the urban centres of Iran has prompted artists to very naturally interweave eastern and western sensibilities and codes so that we get a richly hybridized ‘take’ on the culture. This is what it is like now, these photographs say.

Personal identity is partly about the veil or chador and it is also about drinking tea from an English porcelain cup. Or it is about inserting one’s portrait in a grid of photographs in a book shop or a pharmacy. Or, as in Hossein’s case, identity is devolved from an expatriate situation (Hossein is an Australian based Iran artist). He comments on this trans-cultural state through a large-scale Type C photo titled Longing belonging, where a Persian carpet has been laid in a eucalyptus grove and lit in the middle with a campfire.

Walking around Ey!Iran yesterday – the title incidentally equates with the first line of the country’s national anthem – I was struck with the refusal of the photographers to dramatise conflict or to give the viewer an overtly one-sided sense of Iran. Political commentary is obviously here, but it is nuanced and subtle. Take for instance, the reference to books and language. Arash Hanaei’s Estekhareh imagery replaces the famous Persian illuminated manuscript illustrations with contemporary photographs of women. Arash’s work is juxtaposed with Mehran Mohajer’s Undistributed packages of newspaper covered books so that we conclude censorship still occurs in that country. I enjoy the way Mandana has hung works of a similar tenor together, like this.

In the black and white photographs by Hamila Vakili’s simply titled Myself, jeans are worn in one shot and the chador in another while a brick wall behind has mortaring in one and is stacked without reinforcement in another. It is such a pared back comment on identity which goes beyond gender to a societal comment on the situation of the broader community. There is a very intimate video by Ghazaleh Hedayat, of a woman’s face soundlessly crying and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Sadegh Tarafkan gives us Temptation, which presents a heroic subject in alternative guise. In part a reference to the Last Supper he uses pomegranates not apples to convey difference.

I could continue commenting on further works but I know that Mandana has already taken many of you around the exhibition and furthermore the catalogue essay by Hamid Severi is very interesting and informative. It really remains for me to say in opening Ey!Iran that I believe this is an important exhibition for us, not least because it is a departure from the historical shows we usually receive in this country from the Middle East. I hope that it tours widely and increases the appetite of all of those interested in contemporary photography to find out more about artists pushing the boundaries of creative expression in Iran.
Thank you.

Anne Kirker is a freelance curator and writer and is the author of several publications including New Zealand Women Artists: A survey of 150 Years. Anne was Senior Curator (Special Projects) at the Queensland Art Gallery where she held the position of Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs from 1988-2001. She is currently working on a major contemporary Californian art exhibition for the new Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.

He wairua kore, te Po te Ao
He wehenga rua, ka awatea;
Ka puta, ko Hauora
Ko te ao whakatupu, ka puawai
Kua tau, kua tau…

Without spirit, Darkness: Light
Dawning from Their separation
Emerged the Breath of Life
As the world, growing, blossomed
And was realised…

John Bevan Ford (1930-2005) was one of our finest contemporary Maori artists. Alongside peers Ralph Hotere, Clive Arlidge, Fred Graham, Paratene Matchitt and others, he was a pioneer of the contemporary Maori arts movement. He is acknowledged for his prolific and outstanding contribution to art and education both in New Zealand and abroad.

John believed that the land came first, as a life force beyond humans, that land was mana imbued by spirituality that connected us with the ‘whole’. Throughout his lifetime he strove to make connections through his work, with the peoples and cultures of Te Moananui-a-Kiwa, and travelling further afield to China, Europe, and Canada. Always mindful of the strengths of his Maori heritage, he drew inspiration from the customary arts of raranga, taniko, whakairo, kowhaiwhai and korowai. John was also well known as an eloquent and colourful speaker who shared his knowledge of Maori culture with pride and challenge.

John’s beautiful and skillful compositions pull at the threads of the heart to remind us of our connections to culture, histories and art making. His korowai are suspended within the space of Ranginui, like symbols of status and mana protecting the mana of the land, Papatuanuku, and travel with his sea vessels, guiding them into harbours and bays. His taniko borders both contain and ground vigorous energies, and turn his compositions into cloaks. His works are full of cosmological narratives that acknowledge his Maori heritage. John writes of the sea as the force that brought us together and the force that keeps us apart.

The Exhibition

He Aho Tangata is being developed by Te Manawa Museums Trust and curated by arts lecturer and fellow artist Kura Te Waru Rewiri. This major retrospective will open in April through July 2008 and draw extensively from collections from throughout the country.

The exhibition will celebrate his art practice from the 1960’s through to 2005, including;

1966-1970’s – early acrylic works
Early 1980’s – early cloak works; Te Hono- the Connections
late 1980’s – He Pihi – The Shoots
late 1980’s – Manawatu works
1991 – Te Hono ki Zeelandia Nova – The Connections with the Netherlands
1992-1994 – Te Tohunga Waka – The Navigator series
1996-2000 – Pacific Rim series
1999 – Taniko border works
1998 – series of “bird” works
2001-2005 – South Island works

Further information is available from Exhibition Services if required. Please note that the exhibition opens in April next year so is still being developed and finalized. Additional information will be posted on this website as details become available.

The Tour

In order to make the exhibition accessible to a wide variety of venues, a selection of core works from the Te Manawa exhibition will be made available for a national tour from Aug 08 through Dec 2009. The tour will consist of 40-50 paintings, works on paper, sculpture, ephemera, and an AV component drawn from past documentary and other archive footage. The show will be accompanied by a publication, details of which will be announced shortly.

A fee of around $6,500+gst will include freight and marine transit insurance. See ‘package on offer’ for further details.

The touring show will demand approximately 70 running metres.

TATAU: Samoan tattooing and global culture

Photographs by Mark Adams

Dates: January 2008 – July 2010

Tatau has been successfully exhibited in New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The exhibition last showed at the Ontario College of Art and Design Professional gallery in Toronto in 2008 and will open at the Museum of Anthropology University of British Columbia in early 2009. The exhibition is available to additional North American venues after August 2009. It will travel to the University of Cambridge in the UK in 2010.

THE EXHIBITION

Tatau is a major photographic exhibition by Mark Adams, one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary photographers. Since 1978 Adams has documented the practice of Samoan tattooists in a series of portraits and ‘genre’ studies of the tattooing operation, set in domestic suburban interiors. The project is one of several photofiles in which Adams has developed a personal response to the legacy of colonial history in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific.

Based on a twenty five year association with the tufuga tatatau (tattoo artists) of the ‘aiga Sa Su’a (a titled tattooing family), and in particular on the friendship of tattoo master Sulu’ape Paulo, Tatau is an intimate record of the dynamism and complexity of Samoan tattooing today.

Traditionally, young men acquired the marks of the pe‘a, the male tattoo named after a bat known as the ‘flying fox’, as a rite of passage into manhood – a function it still to some extent serves. Tatau, however, portrays this practice responding to the imperatives of identity in the Samoan diaspora, which now has large immigrant communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It also demonstrates the continuing fascination with the tradition by non-Samoans, exemplified in the tattooing of New Zealand artist Tony Fomison in 1979 and the Dutch tribal art dealer Michelle Thieme in 2000. Today, Samoan tufuga manage global tattooing practices for an international clientele, from Apia to Amsterdam.

First shown at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington New Zealand in 2003, Tatau is one artist’s intimate dialogue with the rich archive of imagery that has been produced since Europeans and Pacific peoples first encountered each other. It is a subtle commentary on the history of ethnographic portraiture and the ethics of cross-cultural representation. Through recurring tropes of the room (with their fascinating contents), the other person, and the ordeal of tattooing, Tatau is a sustained meditation on place and identity, memory and colonial history.

THE ARTIST

Mark Adams is one of New Zealand’s most distinguished documentary photographers. His work on Samoan tattooing, Cook’s sites, Maori-Pakeha interactions, and historic sites around the South Island of New Zealand have been extensively exhibited within New Zealand, and in Europe, Australia, Canada, South Africa, England, and Brazil. (A number of works in this exhibition were included in the 24^th Bienal de Sao Paulo, selected by the curator for Oceania, Louise Neri). His publications include Pakeha-Maori: A Conjuncture (1986), Land of Memories (with Harry Evison, 1993) and Cook’s Sites: Revisiting History (with Nicholas Thomas, 1999). Adams is a full time practicing artist based in Christchurch and Auckland, New Zealand.

THE CURATORS

This exhibition was by Dr Peter Brunt, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, and Sophie McIntyre, former director of the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington.

CATALOGUE AND BOOK

The exhibition is accompanied by a 32-page, illustrated colour catalogue that includes an interview with Mark Adams by Peter Brunt and an essay by Tusiata Avia, writer and poet.

A book on Mark Adams’ photographs of tatau will also be published by Te Papa Press of the Museum of New Zealand in early 2009. Entitled Tatau: Samoan tattooing/New Zealand art/global culture, the book is edited by Sean Mallon, curator of Pacific Collections at the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa and Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. It will feature over 80 full colour images from the series and will include essays by Mallon and Brunt as well as interviews with Mark Adams and Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo.

ORGANIZING VENUE

The Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi is a purpose-built public art gallery that has developed a reputation for its innovative exhibition and event programme which positions it at the forefront of cutting-edge contemporary art and interpretation. The gallery provides a changing programme of local, national and international exhibitions and also manages the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection.

Tatau was organized by the Adam Art Gallery to coincide with an international conference at Victoria University of Wellington focusing on Pacific tattoo traditions in a global perspective, funded by the J. Paul Getty Grant Programme

www.victoria.ac.nz/adamartgallery

Selected images from 1963 – 2003

Best known for the making of landmark movies including Sleeping Dogs, Smash Palace and The World’s Fastest Indian, Roger Donaldson has always armed himself with a camera.

Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi is very proud to be touring Roger Donaldson’s first public exhibition of photographs. ALL DOGS SHOT, presents a stunning collection of black and white photographs shot in New Zealand and around the world.

NB: This is a Lopdell House Gallery tour. Please direct inquiries to Kate Wells at curator@lopdell.org.nz

Artists Statement

This is the first time I have exhibited my photographs.

In 1965 I came to New Zealand from Australia on a summer holiday. I was a geology student and I had been drafted by the Australian army to go to Vietnam. I was very confused about what I should do with my life and very ambivalent about my prospects in Australia. I realized my real passion was photography and so I decided to abandon my career as a geologist and try and become a photographer. ..By now I had fallen in love with New Zealand land and I had with me my treasured 35mm EXACTA camera that I had bought from a childhood friend when I was 16.

Within a couple of weeks I found myself in Nelson and managed to get a job as a beach photographer taking snaps of people on Tahunanui Beach. This was a less than profitable exercise and so I moved on, eventually finishing up in Auckland.

I presented myself on the doorstep of one of New Zealand’s best known fashion photographers of the time, Bill Double. Bill and his assistant Barry McKinley gave me a bed to sleep on and some real encouragement to pursue my dream to become a professional photographer. With their help I put together a portfolio of images and set about trying to get some work and make a name for myself.

I managed to get a job working for another photographer, Cyril Taft and this experience gave me the confidence to set up my first photographic business, “Roger Donaldson Photography Limited” in the basement of a house in Parnell.

During this time I met two people who were to make a big impact on me in the years to come; Bob Harvey and Des Dubbelt. Des was the editor of PLAYDATE, a magazine devoted to movies, fashion and the arts. Bob ran an advertising agency called MacHarmans. These two became life long friends and a real inspiration to me over the years. Des and Bob gave me some of my first paying photographic assignments. For Playdate I photographed the music and fashion scene and for MacHarmans I did commercial work. With their help and encouragement my photographic career was launched. However, it was a real battle working away on my own. Around this time I had the good fortune to meet a like minded guy of a similar age, Mike Smith and together we started Aardvark Films.

Working freelance for Bob Harvey and MacHarmans, led to Aardvark Films making the leap into the world of film-making. I happened to be in MacHarmans discussing a still photo shoot when the possibility of filming some TV commercials for the NZ Labour Party came up and from then on still-photography slowly morphed into me becoming a movie cameraman and ultimately into writing, producing, and directing movies.

My partnership with Mike lasted a couple of years and after we had gone our separate ways I continued shooting stills as well as making documentaries. Around this time I met Ian Mune, a young actor and stage director. Together we set about creating dramatic films, the first of which was “Derek”. Together we collaborated on 10 films. The most important of those was “Sleeping Dogs”

After “Sleeping Dogs” I went on to make “Smash Palace” The international success of that film led to me accepting offers to make a studio film in Hollywood. I was spending less and less time in New Zealand so I reluctantly closed the doors of Aardvark Films. I was then confronted with what to do with fifteen years of film and still photography negatives and prints. I sent all my movie based materials to the NZ Film Archives and put all my photographic and movie equipment as well as all my negatives and prints into a storage facility. As fate would have it, the day I flew out of NZ bound for Los Angeles, the storage facility burnt to the ground and all my original still negatives and equipment were lost in the fire. As a result there are very few images that exist of my still photography work before the early 1980’s.

This loss was a major blow to me. It was some time before I was able to face taking more photos. Although I was spending most of my time directing movies my hobby was still-photography. I built a dark-room under my home in Santa Monica and spent hours working away trying to produce the perfect print of photos I had taken. When digital photography came along I instantly saw how it would revolutionize photography. I was eager to embrace this new world of image capture.

My film “The Getaway” was the second Hollywood movie to be edited digitally. Overnight this new technology changed how films were edited. I recognized that the digital world was upon us and so I bought one of the first digital still-cameras to come on the market.

In the early 1990’s digital imagining was still in its infancy. The prospect of making high-resolution fine art prints that could rival traditional photographic prints in terms of aesthetic value and longevity was still a dream being pursued by a handful of visionaries. Among those early digital pioneers were rock musician Graham Nash and friend and former band road manager of “Crosby, Stills and Nash”, Mac Holbert. Together they established NASH EDITIONS, the first fine art print studio in the world.

Around this time I saw an exhibition in Los Angeles of David Hockney’s work. Some prints in the show were produced by Nash Editions. I tracked down Mac Holbert. He was a mine of information and very generous with his knowledge. I had some of my negatives scanned and printed by them. The high quality results convinced me that digital printmaking was the future of the art.

I now have two Canon digital cameras that I constantly use. With digital photography the feed back as to what the image will ultimately look like is instant. I love it. I also have a Nikon film scanner and do my own scans of my old negatives. I love how I am able to reproduce, with much more precision, what I was hoping to capture in my original photograph. Although it is more time consuming, I am able to produce prints with a subtlety I am much happier with than those that I had done in my darkroom.

The prints in this exhibition “ALL DOGS SHOT”, were digitally produced by me over the last 4 years. Some were originally shot on Kodak black and white negative stock and some on my Canon digital cameras and processed using PHOTOSHOP software. All the prints in this exhibition were printed on Epson printers by me personally.

My commitment to the digital world continues. I am now in the middle of making my first all digital movie. It is being filmed on the new Arriflex D20 High Definition camera and is the first feature film to be shot on this system.

ROGER DONALDSON Documentaries & Short Films

1960s-70s LABOUR PARTY ADVERTISING FILMS – Camerman

1969 TE HENGA – Cameraman/editor

1969 START AGAIN Produced by Bob Harvey & Warwick Brock

Roger Donaldson Camerman

1971 OFFERINGS TO THE GOD OF SPEED about the life of

Southlander, Burt Munro. This documentary was the

inspiration for THE WORLD’S FASTEST INDIAN

1971 GEOFF PERRY documentary on NZ motorcyclist

1973 DEREK with Ian Mune, David Mitchell & Roger Donaldson

1974 THE KAIPO WALL mountaineering documentary

Director/co-camerman

1975 EVEREST a return to Mount Everest with Sir Edmund

Hillary 21 years after his successful ascent

1979 CAPE HORN a sailing expedition around Cape Horn

Director/camerman

1976 Donaldson and Mune produced the following 7 films

under the title WINNERS AND LOSERS:

THE WOMAN AT THE STORE; A GREAT DAY

SHINING WITH THE SHINER; AFTER THE DEPRESSION

BIG BROTHER LITTLE SISTER; A LAWFUL EXCUSE

BLUES FOR MISS LAVERTY

1976 JOCKO (TVNZ drama series) Director

1977, with the help of Larry Parr, Donaldson raised the finances

to make his first feature film, SLEEPING DOGS, based upon the

novel SMITH’S DREAM written by New Zealand author C.K. Stead.

The film starred Sam Neill, in his debut as a feature film actor, as

well as Ian Mune, Warren Oates and Nevan Rowe.

SLEEPING DOGS was a major factor in convincing New Zealand’s

politicians that a Film Commission, financed with public funds,

should be established.

Selected Filmography

1977 SLEEPING DOGS

1980 NUTCASE

1981 SMASH PALACE

1984 THE BOUNTY

1985 MARIE

1987 NO WAY OUT

1988 COCKTAIL

1990 CADILLAC MAN

1992 WHITE SANDS

1994 THE GETAWAY

1995 SPECIES

1997 DANTE’S PEAK

2000 THIRTEEN DAYS

2003 THE RECRUIT

2005 THE WORLD’S FASTEST INDIAN

2007 BAKER STREET (in production)

History Unfurled

Reviewing early colonial and national flags, History Unfurled looks back at the historical use of flags within New Zealand.  Images from previous centuries show the multitude of flags employed by various groups and the range of ways and places in which they were displayed.  Tracing the history of New Zealand’s recognised national flags – the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand, the Union Jack and the current national flag – History Unfurled shows the evolution that the flag has undergone within New Zealand’s history.

Also featuring in the history of the flag in New Zealand is the role it played in the swelling of Commonwealth pride that accompanied Royal Visits.  Photographs depict proud New Zealand children clinging to home-made flags while the members of the Royal Family stand before them.  These depictions of New Zealand’s pride in its colonial roots and in its own identity form an important image of New Zealand’s history and the flag’s role in our past.  The flag and what it represents is synonymous with outpourings of patriotism.

History Unfurled also depicts the enthusiasm with which Maori took on the flag as a symbol.  Having seen the passion and pride with which British soldiers fought for their flag, Maori took on the flag as a symbolic representation of the mana of their people.  In doing so, a dramatic visual past has been created through the designs and uses of the flag in Maori culture, past and present.

Jack or Black – A new flag for the nation?

A new constitution? A new national anthem? A new flag?

The media loves the debate and has given these issues a high profile, none more so than the discussion regarding a new design for our flag.

Jack or Black explores the discussion for a new flag, presents a wide range of proposed designs, provides comments for and against a change, and uses press clippings, cartoons and video to provoke thought and debate on the issue.

History Unfurled & Jack or Black was curated and developed by Pataka – Art.Heritage.Culture

While John Pascoe is well known for his photography documenting New Zealand for the Department of Internal Affairs between the late 1930s and mid-1940s, Songs of Innocence focuses on a previously unexplored area in which Pascoe applied the same devoted and focused attention – his children.

Pascoe used his camera to express the joy he evidently felt in his children’s presence, and to convey their joy of living. These photos, taken during the 1940s, provide a wonderful record of the stories, details and significant elements of his children’s world. They also reflect the national preoccupation – and Pascoe’s – with building homes and raising families, as New Zealanders put the war behind them and concentrated on creating the ideal society.

Exhibition developed by Mahara Gallery Waikanae. Curated by Janet Bayly.

Over many years Michael Seresin has assembled a fantastic collection of images by international master photographers. He has generously offered the work he has here to tour New Zealand.

The exhibition offers New Zealand audiences a rare opportunity to see some of the most famous images in photographic history in their original form as vintage black and white prints. Because of their age and calibre these prints are very valuable. The photographers include some of the best-known names from early to mid 20th century, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Eugene Atget, Josef Sudek, W. Eugene Smith, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Mario Giacomelli, G.H. Brassai, Manuel Alvarez-Bravo and others.

Early twentieth century Paris is represented in several works each by Atget, poetic recorder of old Paris, and Brassai, who photographed habitues of the secretive 1930s demi-monde. Surrealist Paris is evoked by Kertesz’s iconic Satiric Dancer 1926 and Man Ray’s provocative La Prieure 1930. France’s most famous photojournalist Cartier-Bresson has a well-known Mexican image. A Surrealist tone continues in the mysterious image by Mexico’s greatest photographer Alvarez-Bravo Retrato de lo eterno 1935. E.J. Bellocq’s Prostitute, Storyville, New Orleans c1912, reflects Brassai’s concerns. Other Americans include its best-known photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, and William Klein. Bleak British land and cityscapes feature in several well known Brandt works. Still lives by Sudek and Baron Adolf de Meyer extend the exhibition’s theme of beauty. Other photographers include Frank Drtikol, Leonard Herman, Umbo, Mick Lindberg and John Gutman. Artists and musicians are a particular focus, including two portraits of Picasso.

The vintage prints are each startlingly different and unique. Institutional collections tend to have concentrated on modern prints by single individuals. This collection, by contrast, provides an intensely beautiful encapsulation of modernist photography’s key styles and many of its image-makers, who represented for Seresin a fresh and different way of viewing the world.

The collection has added interest because it was assembled by an expatriate New Zealander who has also made his living by his eyes. Seresin was the cinematographer on Roger Donaldson’s 1977 film Sleeping Dogs and later made many films with Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Birdy, Angela’s Ashes) through to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and others. Like Donaldson and Sam Neill, Seresin has re-established a base in New Zealand over the last decade with the successful Seresin Estate winery and olive grove. He continues to give generous support to the visual arts and culture in New Zealand through the winery and his boatshed restaurant at Waterfall Bay in the Marlborough Sounds.

The photographs he has bought reflect Seresin’s attraction to a European aesthetic, culture and history. The images convey romance, beauty, sensuality, mystery and visual poetry. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to access numerous European master works in an affordable way.

Janet Bayly. 5 April 2005

‘Another View’ was curated and organised by the Millennium Gallery, Blenheim.

Icons of Kiwi Consumable Culture

Biscuits are an intimate part of that classic New Zealand ritual – morning and afternoon tea. Cameo Cremes, Gingernuts, Shrewsburys and Vanilla Wines slide from the cellophane with undisguised ease. But what are these all too familiar objects of everyday life and who are the people who make them? Do we ever stop to consider the typographic design, the intricacy of the die-cutter’s craft, the manual labour of the dough-makers, the heat and smell of the ovens, the clatter of sorters, packers, and shippers? Alan Knowles takes us behind the scenes at Griffin’s biscuit manufacturing plant in Lower Hutt. His lens reveals the unexpected and illuminates the invisible: the beauty of repetition, the dance of form, aroha in the workplace and the hands which translate food into art. These icons of Kiwi consumable culture will never be the same.

Dr Sydney J. Shep

Lecturer & Printer, Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington. Author of “The Restaurant at this end of the Universe: Edible Typography in New Zealand”.

Artist’s statement

One of life’s great joys for me is to explore the aesthetic of the commonplace and to seek truth in ordinary things, such as the humble biscuit. There is something comforting about biscuits with their familiar feel, taste and smell, that provides constant sensory stimulation reaching deep into our past to reassure us that some things don’t change. We take them for granted, which is what prompted me to take a closer look.

In 1999 I began photographing biscuits and it wasn’t long before I discovered the smartly-painted bastion of old fashioned commerce sprawled by a stream at the foot of Wainuiomata Hill in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. This was where all the biscuits I had considered significant to my project had been baked since 1938.

The bemused management of Griffin’s Foods had no objection to issuing me with white overalls and steel-capped shoes and giving me the run of the factory to photograph what I liked, so long as I wore a hair net at all times. I took a deep breath of the rich fruit jam aroma permeating the car park and pushed through the heavy plastic fly screen to begin a voyage of discovery in the world of biscuits.

Where I had set out simply to photograph biscuits I found myself confronted by a complex multi-storey factory with 270 staff and the daunting task of making sense of it through the lens of my Hasselblad camera.

The project began at Griffins in May 2000 and I was soon impressed by the ‘family’ community that existed on the site. It was common to meet staff who had worked there all their adult lives, and some had three generations of their family working there at one time. In 2002 alone the company presented twelve gold watches for 25 years service New Zealand wide.

If my pictures prompt a greater consciousness of the place of biscuits in our culture, and if I have been able to give factory staff a moment in the sun for the important work they do, and if those workers gain an insight into the art of their craft through my images, then I have done my work as an artist.

Alan Knowles

Exhibition supported by The New Dowse

When Joanna Margaret Paul died in 2003 she had been working for nearly four decades as an artist and poet. While highly respected in both spheres, she had limited exposure to a national audience.

When the many hundreds of drawings left in her Wanganui studio (most of which had never been exhibited) came to light, it was clear that the practice of drawing was central to her art, as was the fact that the drawings constitute an exceptional body of work that demands to be more widely known. In consultation with the Joanna Margaret Paul Estate, it was decided that an exhibition of the artist’s drawings should be mounted by Mahara Gallery.

The resulting exhibition, Subjects to hand: Joanna Margaret Paul Drawing, examines in depth the practice at the core of her art. Paul’s exquisite graphic touch and ardent observation of the visual world have long been appreciated by those who cherish the tradition that included such forebears as Pierre Bonnard, Giorgio Morandi and Frances Hodgkins. But this exhibition is premised on a conviction that her drawings also have fresh currency in a contemporary art context.

Today, there is renewed interest in drawing as a visual art practice. A generation ago drawing was widely deemed redundant, especially amongst art educators; now it seems to matter again. It is hard to think of a New Zealand artist for whom drawing has mattered more – despite art world fashions – than Joanna Margaret Paul.

Paul drew wherever she was. That dedication and alertness to the visual world is palpable in this exhibition, in her drawings of children, rabbits, bowling greens, chess players, swimming pools, beach fires and lighthouses; even views from aeroplanes and buses. Nothing was beneath her notice.

‘Subjects to Hand’ was curated by Jill Trevelyan and Sarah Treadwell, and developed by the Mahara Gallery, Waikanae. A 140 page full colour book is available from the gallery, through the exhibition venues or from bookstores nationwide.

This exhibition features botanical artist Nancy Adam’s exquisite watercolours and drawings, created over a 50-year period. Despite never having been exhibited, Nancy’s watercolours and drawings are widely known due to the many botanical books that she has written and illustrated.

Yet, for the most part, the printed illustrations have never done justice to the vivid coloration of her watercolours, nor the exquisite delicacy and subtlety of her drawing. This exhibition is an opportunity to view Nancy’s work in its original freshness.

Nancy became the first botanical artist for the Botany Division of the Department of Scientific Research in 1943. Since then, her contribution to botany in New Zealand has been frequently acknowledged during her career. She was awarded the Queen’s Service Order in 1989 and a 1990 Commemorative Medal for services to New Zealand botany. Since her retirement in 1987, Nancy he has been an honorary research associate of the Museum of New Zealand.

The Botanical Drawings of Nancy Adams was curated by Fiona Hall.

The Hiroshima Nagasaki A-bomb Exhibition depicts the horrors when both cities were devastated and thousands of lives were lost in an instant. The suffering inflicted by the atomic radiation on those who survived continues today. Although graphic, this exhibition also offers hope and sets out to educate on nuclear issues.

The Hiroshima Nagasaki A-bomb Exhibition was gifted to the people of New Zealand by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2003, and was first exhibited at town halls in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch.

Sponsored by the Peace & Disarmament Education Trust. 

The exhibition consists of 34 b/w images taken by Bombay photographer D.R.D.Wadia during the 1940’s. It includes portraits and informal images of Gandhi with his friends and followers, and with Nehru, Jinnah and other major political leaders of the Indian independence movement. The photographs portray Gandhi equally at home in quiet villages, at mass public gatherings and formal political meetings.

The exhibition also offers a remarkable collection of original ephemera belonging to Dr Aditya Malik, grandson of the photographer and senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Canterbury University. Items include cotton samples and a handkerchief woven by Gandhi (whilst in prison), hand written letters from Gandhi and Prime Minister Nehru to the photographer’s wife, a commemorative Gandhi glass work by Lalique, and several other items.

Background

D.R.D Wadia was a prize winning amateur photographer based in Bombay. He captured many of the thinkers and artists of the 40s in India, Europe and America. His work, including some of the images in this collection, has been exhibited in India, Germany and New Zealand and has been published in book form.

D.R.D. Wadia and his wife Piroja were – like many others at that time – involved in the independence movement and knew Gandhi personally. At the time the photographs were taken the Wadias lived a few minutes away from where Gandhi conducted various meetings. The photographs thus represent a personal perspective on the public life of one of the world’s most inspiring political leaders.

The Gandhi Exhibition was initiated by Dr Aditya Malik and Dr Jane Buckingham from Canterbury University and is a collaborative effort by members of the university’s South Asia Seminar, an interdisciplinary research and discussion group.

An international exhibition of Music Graphics from the UK & NZ.

Sound Design was presented by the British Council New Zealand, AUT and RIANZ. NZ section curated by Nick Bollinger, assisted by Chris Mousdale.

‘Reclaimed’ was developed and sponsored by the British Council New Zealand.

Exhibition developed by Mahara Gallery and curated by Avenal McKinnon. Sponsored by the Field Collection Trust.

An exhibition of 27 paintings and mezzotints by Dunedin based artist Kathryn Madill.

‘Through the Looking-Glass’ was developed by The Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, and curated by Belinda Jones.