“Landscape is the work of the mind”, wrote Simon Schama. “Its scenery built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”
Land is central to matauranga Māori, and to the current exhibition at Tim Melville, Whenua/Whenua: Wahine Māori Artists. One of the most compelling works is a photograph of stacked stones by Maraea Timutimu.
Dramatically lit, rich with texture and in a precarious balance, these stones have been gathered from the waterways of Maraea’s kainga (village) at Matapihi and Ruatoki. Set atop each other, they become figure-like, a portrait of both the land and the person.
Raukura Turei makes her colours from onē (earth), creating dense paintings from repeated dabs of black sand and blue clay. Her work doesn’t just speak to the land, but is the land. A show not to be missed, Whenua/Whenua includes the work of Margaret Aull, Hiria Anderson-Mita, Aimee Ratana, Natalie Robertson, and Nephi Tupaea.
At Fox Jensen McCrory, director Andrew Jensen invokes the landscape with “outrageous moraine, wonderous tracks, persistent quarrying” to describe Dutch artist Koen Delaere’s thick viscous paintings, and quotes writer Michael Ondaatje “as a writer, one is busy with archaeology,” with it being the same for painters also. These works are physical, showing the marks of the body splayed across a mass of ploughed paint.
The cultural landscape of Karangahape Road is coloured with rainbows, and the Pride and Prejudice exhibition at Bergman Gallery is full of images from our urban environment. Sione Monu adorns a tree’s bare branches with colourful clouds of beads. Philippine artist Louie Bretaña composes celestial deities from raw hessian embedded with glitter and glass crystals. Heather Straka’s three intergenerational figures confront a lunging dog in a strange tableaux of broken rocks and interior details.
Our artists show us the diverse viewpoints we can observe the landscape from, perhaps so we can walk with greater sensitivity on it.
EVAN WOODRUFFE, Studio Art Supplies
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