Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa
By Kirsty Baker
Auckalnd University Press
RRP $69.99
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa is a bold and timely book exploring various threads of women’s art of the past as well as those creating art for our times. Editor and writer Kirst Baker acknowledges the complexity of bringing together writings for such a book in her introduction where she notes “It should come as no surprise that this book does not attempt to offer a complete history of women’s artmaking in this country. Such a project is doomed to fail… Instead, the book winds its way along a path that is both fragmented and politicised”.
Within that winding journey it is the through the fragments that we see ideas and revelations and make connections. It is through the practice of many of these artists and their working within a social and political context that we see the importance and ramifications of art.
The dozen chapters in the book have been written by Kirsty Baker along with Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith and Megan Tamati-Quennell.
The essays are all thought-provoking with a mix of biography, narrative, interviews, observations and reflections. These offer new ways at looking at the art created by women but also the nature of art and art institutions.
Baker notes that there are a number of themes running through the book which are indicative of the often different world in which many female artists exist and work.
There is the way that women artists have interrogated their relationship with the land and place and the way they have pushed against gendered limitations.
There is also the way that artists have used their practice to comment on art history and arts institutions and the way that art making plays a role in the care and transmission of knowledge.
In not being a contiguous history of women’s art, the gaps and exclusions are often apparent. These gaps mean at times the book is less satisfying without the linkages of history and context.
While not a history the book covers over two hundred years of art making in New Zealand and includes painters, photographers, performers, sculptors, textile artists and writers. The work of these artists spans whatu kākahu through to the recent work of the Mataaho Collective. Along the away there are chapters on a diverse range of artists – Frances Hodgkins, Rita Angus, Rangimārie Hetet, Pauline Rhodes, Teuane Tibbo, Yuki Kihara and Ruth Buchanan.
With over 150 illustrations the books also provide a visual history of women’s art which is well integrated with the texts.
The essay on Frances Hodgkins provides a succinct overview of her life and work while highlighting the issues which impacted on women artists of the early part of the twentieth century.
The essay on Kura Te Waru-Rewiri reveals the way in which Māori artists have addressed issues of mythology. history and land using abstraction as a means of conveying ideas.
Many of the chapters focus on the issues around the land, whānau and wāhine which is seen in the work of artists such as Robyn Kahukiwa so it is surprising that Robin White, Sylvia Siddell and Jaqueline Fahey who have documented the family and domesticity for several decades are not mentioned.
The other area of exclusion is around abstraction for while the work of Vivian Lynn, Kura Te Waru-Rewiri and Imogen Taylor is included artists such as Phillipa Blair and Gretchen Albrecht are omitted.
The final chapter in the book concerns the work by the Mataaho Collective, a group which has recently won the prestigious Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale. The chapter predates the win but much of what is written is relevant to the work which has generated more column inches than any previous New Zealand exhibition at the Venice event.
Here there seems to be a disconnection because of the six previous New Zealand female artists to exhibit at the Biennale. only Lisa Reihana and Yuki Kihara are mentioned. That the four other women selected over a twenty yar period to represent New Zealand at the world’s most high-profile event seems puzzling.
Despite this oversight and others, the book is still one which offers much in understanding the developing history of women’s art in New Zealand as well as way that they have been impacted by social acceptance and cultural institutions.
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