Tag: history

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Niue’s Hikulagi Sculpture Park

John Daly-Peoples

Niue’s Hikulagi Sculpture Park: A Global Microcosm

Sited in the middle of the natural rainforest of the Pacific Island of Niue is a physically small but conceptually monumental installation / treatise on global environment concerns, the Hikulagi Sculpture Park.

The Hikulagi Park was established in 1996 by members of the then Tahiono Arts Collective, a small group of artists including Mark Cross. Many had returned to their Pacific home, countering the trend of urban drift that has devastated many rural and island populations in the Pacific.

Several acres of land south of the eastern village of Liku were at the artists’ disposal and, while being ideal for the purpose of the artists’ environmental concerns, it was also ironically surrounded by the pristine rainforest which once covered the now degraded land.

The park’s concept embraces the sentiment that an island is analogous to Planet Earth in microcosm, and so is intended to encourage discussion on issues such as, pollution, climate change and human co-existence. It is a place where the intrinsic and unique qualities of Niuean Culture and environment can be shared with the world while attracting attention to Niue through the medium of contemporary sculpture, a medium seen nowhere else in the Pacific Islands.

Its intention is to do this through audience participation and the predominant utilisation of the found object; that is to say, the artists and community make sculpture from the inorganic waste created by contemporary consumer society.

With this in mind, the centrepiece of the park is the monumental sculpture called ‘Protean Habitat’ which epitomises the ideals behind the Hikulagi Sculpture Space. On-going and interactive, it is an art project that does not have any perception of a finite conclusion. Based on a wooden substructure, it is an assemblage sculpture fundamentally constructivist in its utilisation of the found object that can easily be attached with the most basic of tools, enabling passers-by to add their own input.

In its state of ever-changing growth the sculpture reflects the state of the world and the refuse that humanity is accumulating in its juggernaut consumerist path to who-knows-where. This vagueness of direction and final outcome of humanity are then reflected in the unexpected directions the sculpture will take during its growth and the fact that it will grow ad infinitum.

The first sculpture to be erected at the park in 1996 was by Niuean returnee Mikoyan Vekula, who grew up in Wellington. His ‘Odesyk’ is a six-metre semicircle of six totem poles of native Kafika hardwood decorated intricately with cut and inverted beer cans. The circle is completed by limestone rocks known as Makatea throughout Polynesia. Resisting the Polynesian artist trend of introspection in his imagery, Vekula draws from a number of indigenous cultures including Australian, American and Celtic .The totems in this esoterically titled sculpture depict a family, with the guardians on each end of the semicircle and the four children in the middle. At the centre of the circle is a bench intended for the viewer’s contemplation and meditation.

Several more ephemeral artworks have been created by artists who just happen to be passing through Niue. A good example is ‘Web’, a sculpture created by environmental artist Meri Heitala from Helsinki which has been made by stringing telephone wire, spider-web-like, between two coconut trees while attaching drink can tear tabs, which suggests captured insects. In this way, such ephemeral sculptures are encouraged to enlist the input from visiting artists who may not have the time to create something more permanent.

A recent project that is more of an enclosure than a sculpture is ‘Sale’s Fale’, an ongoing project in memory of the Niue High School art teacher and sculpture park co-founder Charles Jessop who passed away in 2012. The sculpture is in the form of a monumental montage constructed by the Niue community through the biennial competition ‘The Charles Jessop Memorial Sculpture Prize’

The Hikulagi Sculpture space to date is being created through the voluntary labour of various individuals and businesses on Niue. Initial funding at its inception was provided by the Pacific Development and Conservation Trust as well as the then Aus-Aid Cultural Fund. The space has been supported by Reef Shipping, The New Zealand High Commission to Niue and Niue Tourism has helped with some construction and on-going maintenance.


Protean Habitat is an ongoing monumental assemblage in an ever-changing state of growth and decay, not unlike all life on the planet Earth. It has an interactive element whereby the public are invited to add their own sub-sculptures to the substructure leaving their small indelible mark on the growth of the main construction.

Mark Cross who has had over 40 years of association with the Island of Niue says “I have been alert to the layers upon layers of humanity that has come and gone leaving small elements of their lives making a small community into a living protean organism. In such an isolated community this awareness becomes more acute and then you realize what you are experiencing is a microcosm of the whole world. So, in its state of ever-changing growth, the sculpture reflects the state of the world and the refuse that humanity is accumulating in its juggernaut consumerist path to who knows where. This vagueness of direction and the final outcome of humanity is then reflected in the unpredictable directions the sculpture will take during its growth and the fact that it may or may not grow ad infinitum.”

The concept behind the Hikulagi Sculpture Park has links to the Watts Towers in Los Angles and Palais Ideal in Hauterives, France.

The Watts Towers are a collection of 17 interconnected sculptural, structures, built by Simon Rodia over a period of 33 years from 1921 to 1954. The Palais Ideal is a series of constructions built by postman. Ferdinand Cheval over 33 years 1879–1912 in Hauterives, France.

A new project will involve the internationally recognised sculptor Chris Booth who has produced more than twenty large scale sculptures around the world. The sculptor travelled to Niue in 2023 when he ascertained the potential sculptural medium of rocks and stones as well as meeting with potential collaborators such as the leading weavers in the village of Liku,

As weaving is the most dynamic artform existing in Niue today Chris has identified with it and master weavers Enele Kaiuha and Ahi Makaea-Cross have agreed to collaborate and transfuse ideas that may influence the design of the sculpture. This collaboration will in turn enable the project managers to interest the wider community in becoming involved both in a practical way (the collection of rocks and stones) and as an audience in the construction of the sculpture and the finished work. We also anticipate that the schools both primary and secondary to be involved from the outset to the completion, the project being a unique opportunity for the children to be exposed to contemporary art practice if not being more closely involved in its construction.

In 2024 he again travelled to Niue in September to try to decide on a more definite concept for the sculpture. Prior to his arrival the Broadcasting Corporation of Niue (BCN) offered the project a cyclone damaged, 8 metre diameter, aluminium satellite dish which could be inverted to form a dome structure. This would support around 1700 150mm rocks from the quarry while another 500 or so weathered beach rocks would provide a contrast to the more jagged quarry stone which would be employed to create the patterns used in the “tia” coil weaving technique (placemats, bowls etc). The use of the satellite dish also fits within the strong Hikulagi ethos of the re and upcycling of obsolete consumer and industrial materials as an environmental statement.

https://www.markcross.nu/

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Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide

John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds

Massey University Press

RRP $37.00

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

John Walsh and photographer Patrick Reynolds have just launched “Wellington Architecture, A Walking Guide” their third book in the series of architectural walking tours following on from their books on Auckland and Christchurch. It is a great addition to books which explore and explain our built environment.

 John Walsh in the introduction notes that he was born in Wellington which was as “compact and confined as a medieval city-state, intensely impressed itself on me, in the most impressionable part of my life. My mother had moved to Wellington where she met my father, and they were married in the church at St Gerard’s Monastery. I remember the Freyberg Pool, where I learned to swim; the summer lights strung on the Norfolk pines along Oriental Parade; and the council yard where my father worked, next to the Herd Street Post and Telegraph Building. My high school was near the old National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum; we’d be sent to mass at St Mary of the Angels and, in blazers and ties, despatched from Wellington Railway Station on rugby expeditions into the hinterlands of the Hutt Valley.”

Public Trust Building

This reviewer also grew up in  Wellington, living in the National Hotel  across from  the corner of Stout St and  Lambton Quay. From our front room we had an impressive architectural vista including The Public Trust Building The Government Departmental Building and The State Insurance Building. Further down the street was the Wellington Railway Station  and the Seamans Mission Building.

On my way to school I passed  Ernst Plischke’s Massey House, The Old Supreme Court, The Old Government Building, The Beehive, Parliament building, the General Assembly Library, Turnbull House and the rather unfortunate Cathedral of St Paul. These were the background to my life at the time and it was only when I moved to suburban Karori that I noticed the difference in my daily environment.

Shed 7, Wellington Harbour Board

The place of architecture in our environment and in our personal and social history is important often more noticeable when we are in foreign cities. A city’s buildings are important in defining the nature of a place. When visiting a place for the first time the visitor will map a city through its buildings. The materials, the orientation, the colours, the decoration and the forms all help create the language of the way the city is perceived.

The buildings of Auckland Wellington and Christchurch have many similarities but the accumulation of the various periods of construction and styles in each of those places has created very individual environments.

“Wellington Architecture, A Walking Guide” features more than 120 significant buildings describing their purpose and history as well as  providing a background on  the architects who designed them. The buildings are grouped into five self-guided walking routes, each with a map together with itineraries which collectively create a portrait of the  city.

St John’s

The building are  a mix of colonial, nineteenth century Gothic, mid-century modernism and buildings of the last fifty years illustrating the changing nature of the architecture along with the changing nature of New Zealand and the city. The buildings are banks, businesses, government departments, churches, apartment buildings libraries, hotels, apartments, and a few  private houses.

One of the tours features several of the government institutions surrounding Parliament including the Old Government Building (now the Victoria University Law School) and one on the largest wooden buildings in the world, all those other buildings I passed on the way to school along with the more recent  brutalist National Library and the modernist Freyberg Building.

Several architects feature with a number of buildings such as Gummer & Ford, Thomas Turnbull and Ian Athfield who is represented by the Wellington Library (soon to be reopened) and his Oriental Parade flats as well as a few, often controversial,  additions he made to existing buildings

DeLoitte, 20 Customhouse Quay

While all the buildings are significant there are a number  scattered through the  walk which have importance beyond their architectural qualities. There are the Dixon Street Flats which were the first multi-story modernist block of flats created under the First Labour Government which show the influence of overseas trends introduced to New Zealand by Plischke.

There is also the remarkable Futuna Chapel designed by John Scott the Māori architect who managed to combine aspects of Māori and mainstream architecture. Walsh notes that Futuna is  one of the few buildings one could refer to as “iconic”.

Asked which building he regarded as the most interesting new building in Wellington he has stated that it is Heke Rua the new building for New Zealand’s Archive beside the National library, both for its architecture as well its signaling a commitment to preserving the nations documentary heritage.

Walsh writes in an informative style, providing wide ranging information to provide a context for the buildings so that while the book is an ideal complement to a walking tour of the city it is also provides a potted history of the social, political and aesthetics development over 150 years in the city as seen through the buildings.

The photography of Patrick Reynolds enhances the text with many of them showing an appreciation of the design elements of the buildings, 

Anscombe Flats
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Reviews, News and Commentary

Wellington Architecture: a Walking Guide

Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide

John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds

Massey University Press

RRP $37.00

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

John Walsh and photographer Patrick Reynolds have just launched “Wellington Architecture, A Walking Guide”  a revised edition of the book first published in 2022. This is their third book in the series of architectural walking tours following on from their books on Auckland and Christchurch. It is a great addition to books which explore and explain our built environment.

 John Walsh in the introduction notes that he was born in Wellington which was as “compact and confined as a medieval city-state, intensely impressed itself on me, in the most impressionable part of my life. I remember the Freyberg Pool, where I learned to swim; the summer lights strung on the Norfolk pines along Oriental Parade; and the council yard where my father worked, next to the Herd Street Post and Telegraph Building. My high school was near the old National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum; we’d be sent to mass at St Mary of the Angels and, in blazers and ties, despatched from Wellington Railway Station on rugby expeditions into the hinterlands of the Hutt Valley.”

A building with a dome on the top AI-generated content may be incorrect.Public Trust Building

This reviewer also grew up in Wellington, living in the National Hotel across from the corner of Stout St and Lambton Quay. From our front room we had an impressive architectural vista including The Public Trust Building, The Government Departmental Building and The State Insurance Building. Further down the street was the Wellington Railway Station.

On my way to school I passed Ernst Plischke’s Massey House, The Old Supreme Court, The Old Government Building, The Beehive, Parliament building, the General Assembly Library, Turnbull House and the rather unfortunate Cathedral of St Paul. These were the background to my life at the time and it was only when I moved to suburban Karori that I noticed the difference in my daily environment.

A building with a dome top AI-generated content may be incorrect.Shed 7, Wellington Harbour Board

The place of architecture in our environment and in our personal and social history is important often more noticeable when we are in foreign cities. A city’s buildings are important in defining the nature of a place. When visiting a place for the first time the visitor will map a city through its buildings. The materials, the orientation, the colours, the decoration and the forms all help create the language of the way the city is perceived.

The buildings of Auckland Wellington and Christchurch have many similarities but the accumulation of the various periods of construction and styles in each of those places has created very individual environments.

“Wellington Architecture, A Walking Guide” features more than 126 significant buildings describing their purpose and history as well as providing a background on the architects who designed them. The buildings are grouped into five self-guided walking routes, each with a map together with itineraries which collectively create a portrait of the city.

A church with a tall steeple AI-generated content may be incorrect.St John’s

The building are a mix of colonial, nineteenth century Gothic, mid-century modernism and buildings of the last fifty years illustrating the changing nature of the architecture along with the changing nature of New Zealand and the city. The buildings are banks, businesses, government departments, churches, apartment buildings libraries, hotels, apartments, and a few private houses.

One of the tours features several of the government institutions surrounding Parliament including the Old Government Building (now the Victoria University Law School) and one on the largest wooden buildings in the world, all those other buildings I passed on the way to school along with the more recent  brutalist National Library and the modernist Freyberg Building.

Several architects feature with a number of buildings such as Gummer & Ford, Thomas Turnbull and Ian Athfield who is represented by the Wellington Library (soon to be reopened) and his Oriental Parade flats as well as a few, often controversial,  additions he made to existing buildings.

Asked which building he regarded as the most interesting nee building in Wellington he has stated that it is Heke Rua the new building for New Zealand’s Archive beside the National library, both for its architecture as well its signaling a commitment to preserving the nations documentary heritage.

Categories
Reviews, News and Commentary

Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide

John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds

Massey University Press

RRP $37.00

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

John Walsh and photographer Patrick Reynolds have just launched “Wellington Architecture, A Walking Guide”  a revised edition of the book first published in 2022. This is their third book in the series of architectural walking tours following on from their books on Auckland and Christchurch. It is a great addition to books which explore and explain our built environment.

 John Walsh in the introduction notes that he was born in Wellington which was as “compact and confined as a medieval city-state, intensely impressed itself on me, in the most impressionable part of my life. I remember the Freyberg Pool, where I learned to swim; the summer lights strung on the Norfolk pines along Oriental Parade; and the council yard where my father worked, next to the Herd Street Post and Telegraph Building. My high school was near the old National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum; we’d be sent to mass at St Mary of the Angels and, in blazers and ties, despatched from Wellington Railway Station on rugby expeditions into the hinterlands of the Hutt Valley.”

A building with a dome on the top AI-generated content may be incorrect.Public Trust Building

This reviewer also grew up in Wellington, living in the National Hotel across from the corner of Stout St and Lambton Quay. From our front room we had an impressive architectural vista including The Public Trust Building, The Government Departmental Building and The State Insurance Building. Further down the street was the Wellington Railway Station.

On my way to school I passed Ernst Plischke’s Massey House, The Old Supreme Court, The Old Government Building, The Beehive, Parliament building, the General Assembly Library, Turnbull House and the rather unfortunate Cathedral of St Paul. These were the background to my life at the time and it was only when I moved to suburban Karori that I noticed the difference in my daily environment.

A building with a dome top AI-generated content may be incorrect.Shed 7, Wellington Harbour Board

The place of architecture in our environment and in our personal and social history is important often more noticeable when we are in foreign cities. A city’s buildings are important in defining the nature of a place. When visiting a place for the first time the visitor will map a city through its buildings. The materials, the orientation, the colours, the decoration and the forms all help create the language of the way the city is perceived.

The buildings of Auckland Wellington and Christchurch have many similarities but the accumulation of the various periods of construction and styles in each of those places has created very individual environments.

“Wellington Architecture, A Walking Guide” features more than 126 significant buildings describing their purpose and history as well as providing a background on the architects who designed them. The buildings are grouped into five self-guided walking routes, each with a map together with itineraries which collectively create a portrait of the city.

A church with a tall steeple AI-generated content may be incorrect.St John’s

The building are a mix of colonial, nineteenth century Gothic, mid-century modernism and buildings of the last fifty years illustrating the changing nature of the architecture along with the changing nature of New Zealand and the city. The buildings are banks, businesses, government departments, churches, apartment buildings libraries, hotels, apartments, and a few private houses.

One of the tours features several of the government institutions surrounding Parliament including the Old Government Building (now the Victoria University Law School) and one on the largest wooden buildings in the world, all those other buildings I passed on the way to school along with the more recent  brutalist National Library and the modernist Freyberg Building.

Several architects feature with a number of buildings such as Gummer & Ford, Thomas Turnbull and Ian Athfield who is represented by the Wellington Library (soon to be reopened) and his Oriental Parade flats as well as a few, often controversial,  additions he made to existing buildings.

Asked which building he regarded as the most interesting nee building in Wellington he has stated that it is Heke Rua the new building for New Zealand’s Archive beside the National library, both for its architecture as well its signaling a commitment to preserving the nations documentary heritage..

Categories
Reviews, News and Commentary

The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the making of the Auckland Museum

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

The Collector; Thomas Cheesemen and the making of the Auckland Museum

Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe

Massey University Press

RRP $65.00

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Museums have had a lot of critical press over the past few years, viewed as agents of the colonizers because their collections often contain artifacts taken from colonized countries, and their early practices reinforced colonial ideologies by presenting the colonizer as superior. They functioned as a means of control, where European museums collected objects from voyages of exploration and colonies to showcase their dominance and justify the imperial project. But a major thrust of museums has also been to preserve, interpret, and exhibit the local cultural and scientific heritage serving as a bridge between the past and present by collecting objects, telling stories, and providing a space for people to learn, reflect, and connect with history, art, and science.

That has certainly been the aim of the Auckland Museum and the individuals who initiated it, guided it and developed it. A new book “The Collector; Thomas Cheeseman and the making of the Auckland Museum” tells how the Auckland Museum, like man y other museums in the nineteenth century were guided by visionary individuals.

The newly opened Auckland and Institute in 1876 Thomas Cheeseman stands in the doorway

Authors Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe write about the establishment of the museum’s first custom-built building in 1876 at the northern end of Princes Street.  When it opened the director was Thomas Cheesman who had been in the post since 1874, remaining in the post remained in that post until his death in 1923.

They write about the original building which was unfavourably compared to the more ambitious Christchurch Museum. It was “plain, improvised and almost invisible … It was housed in an old public building, with little funding and few staff. But that’s what makes the story compelling. The contrast between the buildings isn’t just architectural — it reflects differing levels of civic support, cultural ambition and access to resources. Auckland’s museum didn’t look like much, but it had people with vision, especially Thomas Cheeseman. Over time, he took that underwhelming space and turned it into a serious scientific institution.”

Under his visionary guidance the Museum and its collections flourished, necessitating a further move and the commissioning of a world-wide architectural competition to design a new Museum for Auckland which would be combined with a war memorial to commemorate soldiers lost in World War I. That new museum opened on its current site in 1929.

Not only did Cheesman manage to the institution for nearly fifty years but as a self-taught botanist he travelled the length and breadth of New Zealand, collecting and recording plants, and observing the geography of the country. During his career, Cheeseman also published numerous important papers on a range of flora, described three plant genera, and numerous plant species from New Zealand and the Cook Islands. At the request of the New Zealand government, Cheeseman began his magnum opus, Manual of the New Zealand flora, which was first published in 1906and in 1914 he edited the two-volume work Illustrations of the New Zealand flora.

Thomas Cheeseman

Cheeseman met or corresponded with many of the scientists in New Zealand as well as extensive professional relationships with local and international colleagues, including  the German-born geologist and director of the Canterbury Museum, Julius von Haast, the geologist James Hector of the the Colonial Museum, the geologist, zoologist and museum director Frederick Hutton as well as  Sir Joseph Hooker at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. 

Early on in his career he even corresponded with Charles Darwin as the authors write. “Charles Darwin was arguably the most famous scientist in the world and also one of the most controversial. And it wasn’t just a lucky moment. Cheeseman’s note was careful, respectful and scientifically rigorous. It showed that he wasn’t just some amateur with an opinion — he was a careful observer who took the work seriously. Darwin saw that. For Cheeseman, it must have been thrilling and validating. It also helped open doors — that exchange helped establish his credibility in the scientific world, and it reinforced the idea that valuable knowledge didn’t just come from Oxford or London, it could come from a young man on the edge of empire, with a sharp mind and a notebook. That Cheeseman dared to write at all — and so confidently — speaks volumes about both his scientific maturity and his quiet self-assurance.”

The book highlights Cheeseman’s efforts to develop the taonga Māori component of the museum and also touches on the ethically sensitive area of collecting the art and culture of Māori noting ‘While Thomas Cheeseman was largely guided by the norms of nineteenth-century science, some of his actions — particularly around the acquisition and display of taonga Māori — now fall into ethically ambiguous, if not outright troubling, territory. His drive to build the Auckland museum’s collections sometimes led him to treat cultural objects as specimens, detached from the communities that made and valued them.

His acquisition methods could also be problematic. In several cases, taonga were obtained through missionary networks, collectors or private sales, often with little documentation about provenance or permission. Cheeseman rarely questioned the ethics of these transactions… These actions were not driven by malice, but rather by an unshakeable belief in the civilising power of museums and the primacy of scientific classification.”

The book tells the history and development of the Auckland Museum and its progress over more than fifty years to the triumph of the building on the present site in Auckland Doman. It also tells of the journey of Thomas Cheeseman who become a great person of influence not just in Auckland but nationally.  The book also gives an account of the changing scientific and cultural landscape of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century.

It is a well-researched and written book, thoughtfully designed with numerous images which help tell the entwined stories of Cheeseman, the development  of scientific inquiry, the museum and museum’s collections.

Andrew McKay holds a PhD in art history from the University of Auckland and was a Professional Teaching Fellow in the university’s art history department.

Richard Wolfe is an Associate Emeritus of the Auckland War Memorial Museum and from 1978 to 1997 was Curator of Display. He has written numerous books on New Zealand art, history and popular culture.

To subscribe or follow New Zealand Arts Review site – www.nzartsreview.org.

The “Follow button” at the bottom right will appear and clicking on that button  will allow you to follow that blog and all future posts will arrive on your email.

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The Hanly House Residency. Preserving the legacy of Gil and Pat Hanly

John Daly-Peoples

The Hanly House Residency

A visionary plan to preserve, establish and maintain the home of Gil and Pat Hanly as an artist’s residency and museum at 7 Walters Road, Mt Eden was recently announced at the artist’s former home.

The house and extensive tropical garden located in the heart of Mt Eden, would operate as a social hub, gallery and museum as well as an education and research space for New Zealand art history, and a unique supported urban artists’ residency and studio for emerging contemporary artists locally and from across the world.

Iconic New Zealand artists Pat, a painter and Gil, a documentary photographer, contributed significantly to the social, political and cultural landscape of Aotearoa. Through the Hanly House project the family wish to celebrate Pat and Gil’s contributions to the cultural landscape of Aotearoa, and for visitors and researchers to enjoy and be inspired by it.

The Artist Residency Programme would support artist at a critical point in their career development by providing the house rent free for up to five years.

The residency would work with key stakeholders including Te Papa, AAG, ELAM and ILAM to achieve that goal.

Initial aims of the Hanly House would be to raise capital to purchase the house and garden from the Family. Once established it is intended that house would host regular arts focused functions and support public access to events at the house, support public access to the  garden and raise operational funds through events, endowment fund, and edition sales.

ARTIST RESIDENCY DETAILS

  • Long term (3 -5-year residency programme)
  • Open to national and international artists through an arts partner organisation.
  • Selection Process and Programme in Partnership with Te Papa, AAG, ELAM, ILAM
    • Artist to be between 30 and 40 years old
    • Artist’s family welcome to reside with artist
    • On acceptance of the residency, The Artist will be expected to reside and work at the address for the duration of the period, with standard holiday breaks.
    • The residing Artist participation and outcome expectations would include
      • Attend the Annual Garden Party Functions at the house.
      • Speak at quarterly In Conversation programmes at the house or another arts organisation.
      • Deliver a body of work or installation that responses to the region.
      • Produce and gift to the Trust a series of limited edition to the value of $20,000 for fundraising purposes.

The Hanly Family Trust is currently supporting the development of the Hanly House proposal and is calling on individuals for support. Supporters can make immediate donations of $5 or more and can pledge donations which will help offset the establishment costs and enable the commissioning of further development plans.

Supporters can register at various tiers:

  • Heart 1M+
  • Kowhai 500K+
  • Dove 100K+
  • Hope 5K+
  • Activist 1K+
  • Benefactors will be acknowledged, onsite, in print material and at functions.

To subscribe or follow New Zealand Arts Review site – www.nzartsreview.org.

The “Follow button” at the bottom right will appear and clicking on that button  will allow you to follow that blog and all future posts will arrive on your email.

Or go to https://nzartsreview.org/blog/, Scroll down and click “Subscribe”

For more information – hanlyhouse.nz

Contact diane.blomfield@icloud.com to discuss your pledge.

To subscribe or follow New Zealand Arts Review site – www.nzartsreview.org.

The “Follow button” at the bottom right will appear and clicking on that button  will allow you to follow that blog and all future posts will arrive on your email.

Or go to https://nzartsreview.org/blog/, Scroll down and click “Subscribe”

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PĀ – Te Huarahi ki te Kāinga  Hiria Anderson-Mita’s continuing journey

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Hiria Anderson-Mita

PĀ – Te Huarahi ki te Kāinga Finding my way Home’

Tim Melville Gallery

Until November 15

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Writing about Hiria Anderson-Mita a couple of years ago I noted that she “has never had to look far for subject matter. She only has to look around the room, out the window or down the road. Her paintings are essentially documentation of her daily life, painting what she sees, the people she encounters and her immediate experiences.”

Her domestic interiors or local views of her local environment were both mundane and intriguing.

This incongruity in many of her works give the images both a simplicity and sophistication. One could compare her paintings to the simple French Impressionist paintings as well as the recent landscape paintings of David Hockney, in creating timeless views.

In her latest exhibition the  paintings and view points have been extended, broadening out from the local to the wider area of hers and her ancestors land  so the exhibition becomes for her “a return to the ancestral landscapes that have shaped who I am.”

In the catalogue notes she writes “The tracts of farmland in these artworks hold the DNA and stories of my ancestors. Their ridges and valleys are layered with the pā sites of my tūpuna; connections that survey pegs and ownership papers can never sever.
 
In fact those pegs and papers are reference points for rediscovery.  

Through researching Māori Land Court records and field books made by 19th Century Government Surveyor William Cussen – alongside maps, archaeological files, photographs, oral histories and the living landscape itself – I am tracing the footprints of my tūpuna.

Each painting in this exhibition describes and locates a site of history and connection within the rohe of Ōtewa, Rangitoto Tuhua and the surrounding pā of Ngāti Maniapoto and Rereahu.

The pā tuna, the kohatu, the maunga, and the awa I paint were once sources of sustenance  for entire communities. I want to make them visible once more; to bring them into the light. And to reinsert our knowledge and our presence into the whenua from which we have been separated by pen and politics.

I have been guided by ancestors who still reside within me. My paintings are my journey home.”

Central to the works is the large “Ōtuaoroa” ($11,500) which is the original name for the area. The artist calls the painting “A map”, so the image is like the chart of a mythical land or a treasure map found in a children’s book with each road, farm, bend in the river all bearing a history. Many of these places are then seen in a larger format in other paintings such as “Puketarata Rd No2” ($3500) which is the view from her childhood home or “Hikurangi Pa” ($3250) a  bend in the river where her ancestors had been born and which sustained the local population with food.

There are also links to the geomorphological qualities of the land which had intrigued Colin McCahon and his study of the landforms and their history.

Puketarata Pā

This idea of discovering the history and formation of the land is seen in Puketarata Pā ($7500) where the landscape is inscribed with other information such a pre-European name, survey number, the indication of tracks or landforms as well as the Google Earth Coordinates.

Turamoe Pa Otuaoroa (Te Kooti’s Lookout)

Most of the works have personal connection to the artist and their importance and significance is made clear from their titles of the catalogue notes. So, there is the obvious “Otewa – My Mothers Ancestral Home ($3500) as well as “Turamoe Pa Otuaoroa (Te Kooti’s Lookout)” ($3250) featuring the hill site where Te Kooti spent the last years of the Land Wars.

Otwea Pa – Into the Future

Most of the works in the exhibition are landscapes but there are a few are more emblematic. One “Otewa Pa – Into the Future ($5750), a portrait of a niece where the artist envisions the future and  there is the more abstract “Hinaki a Rautawhiri / Te Awa a Tane Pa Tuns” ($4750) which looks to the past with a design  featuring netting used to trap fish and fowl.

The paintings in the exhibition paintings along with a poem she has written, “her return Home” as well as many of her previous paintings build a visual biography of her personal connections with the land, a history which is both personal, tribal and mythological.

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Case Studies: Where did our plants go

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Felicity Jones and Mark Smith

Case Studies: A story of plant travel 

Massey University Press

RRP $85.00

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Case Studies Exhibition

Silo Park

October 9 – 19

The movement of plants and foods between countries and around the globe has been going on for centuries, linked to human migration, creating new trading routes, altering the appreciation of plants and changing diets.

The rose which is so central to English culture originated in Asia while the now staple food of the potato and the tomato came from South Ameruca. Even the kūmara was brought to New Zealand by Polynesian voyagers around 700-800 years ago. 

Since the voyages of Captain Cook and other European explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there has been a huge increase in the movement of plants species between Europe and New Zealand and a new book “Case Studies” explores this activity.

The book explores how the British Empire came to dominate the globe linked to the intriguing story of how the Wardian Case designed by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. The case was an early type of terrarium, a sealed protective container for protecting foreign plants imported to Europe from overseas.

Mark Smith / Felicity Jones, Foraged, Nevis Rd, Central Otago

However the book is much more than an historic account of the Wardian case, plant movement and transfer. It is also a catalogue of an exhibition featuring numerous ‘Installations’ by Jones of plants in small glass cases placed in various environments. It is also a journal of the journey of artist / writer Felicity Jones and photographer Mark Smith as they research the book and exhibition.

As the two say about the project “What started as quite a personal exploration has definitely grown into something much larger. Each new idea and road trip revealed another layer, presenting deeper questions about the entanglement of people and plants. We started to realise the work was limitless as it moved backwards and forwards in time, and as we explored notions of beauty and dislocation, systems of knowledge and science, hierarchies of value in the botanical world and the motivations, aspirations, attitudes and beliefs that lay behind plant travel. Early on, we sat down and made a kind of wish list — plants and locations that had always interested us or that linked back to Dr Ward in some way”.

Mark Smith / Felicity Jones Lupins, Lindis Pass, Otago

Over the seven years of the project, Jones and Smith created and photographed evocative case installations in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Their journey took them from the forest and beach of Auckland West Coast, Central Otago and the Lindis River to Oxford punts, London’s Natural History Museum and the Chelsea Physic Garden.

The book traces that story through photographs and essays with reflections on the implications of plant transfer/movement. Across six essays by Gregory O’Brien, Dame Anne Salmond, Luke Keogh, Mark Carine, Markman Ellis and Huhana Smith, the book considers not only the scientific and colonial ambitions that drove botanical exchange, but also its consequences: ecological disruption, the spread of invasive species, and the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge systems.

The book tells of the way in which many of the plants species which were sent to the UK are now being returned. The ngutukākā or kakabeak is now one of New Zealand’s most endangered plants but seeds taken to Kew by Banks and Solander are being now being used to reestablish the plant.

Then there are the more surreal settings of Tower Bridge in London, The Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens.

Mark Smith / Felicity Jones The Kings Entrance, Chelsea Physics Garden

There are also photographs which are intriguing for their wider history as well. Many of the plants collected by Banks and Solander were wrapped in printers discarded paper with some having been wrapped in copies of the Spectator including an article entitled “Notes upon the 12 books of Paradise” by Joseph Addison. This was an early eighteenth version of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” with illustrations by William Blake.

It is a handsomely designed book thanks to designer Murray Dexter which includes two page spreads with smaller photographs, mixing the descriptive and documentary with the quirky, thoughtful and reflective.  It is an unusual and slightly surreal book in many ways. While the text and many of the photographs provide both an historical and personal narrative these same photographs of the glass cases in the environment convey a strange dreamlike vision, somehow disconnected from the physical worlds.

The launch of the book will coincide with an exhibition of many of the photographs.

Exhibition title: Here, There, Now

Venue: Silo 6, Silo Park Wynyard Quarter

Exhibition dates: October 9-19, 11am-6pm daily, free, open to the public.

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Tony Fomison : Life of the Artist

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Tony Fomison : Life of the Artist

By Mark Forman

Auckland University Press

RRP $59.99

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Mark Forman’s new book on Tony Fomison is a superb piece of scholarship which adds to our understanding of the life of one of the great New Zealand artists of the late twentieth century.  His writing is particularly informative as there are no images of Fomison’s work in the book. The trustees of his estate, his three daughters, withheld permission to use his work because of assumptions and inaccuracies.

Forman has made up for this with perceptive descriptions of many of the artists important works as well as providing an understanding of the artist and the environment in which he developed his work

Forman’s detailed research, obvious from his bibliography along with the numerous interviews he had with other artists, family members and friends enabled him to give the reader insights into Fomison life and thoughts. He has also included a number of quotes from newspapers and magazines of reviews of the artist’s work and there are also accounts of Fomison irritation at unfavourable reviews.

Fomison had been to Ilam Art School at Canterbury University where he had met  a number of artists who he would be friends for the rest of his life including Quentin McFarlane and Des Helmore, Later he would meet Philip Clairmont, Allen Maddox and Colin McCahon. He was also influenced by some of the tutors at Ilam notably Bill Sutton and Rudi Gopas.

In the chapters covering his later life Forman has accounts of his involvement with his various gallerists including Elva Bett, Tina and Kees Hos, Peter McLeavey as well as John Gow and Gary Langsford. There were also other important figures who helped and supported him such as Charles Brasch and Jim and Mary Barr

In the 1960s, Fomison began painting and exhibiting portraits that were, even then very different from many of the other portraits by his peers. His were often distorted, maniacal and tapped into his own troubled life.

Also in the 1960’s as well as pursuing an art career he studied and recorded a number of the Māori rock drawings in Canterbury which became part of his art references

The 1970s was a particularly troubled period in Fomison’s life  after he had returned from  Europe which had included a spell in a mental institution.

He was down and out, grappling with drug addiction, and he began producing  work which was contemptuous and cynical about society.

Many of these artists he identified with were ‘outsider artists’ which Fomison identified with and his dark figures and landscape  began to emerge in his paintings. His monsters, misfits, and medical deformities challenged polite society, and explored what it means to be an outsider. Fomison began to paint people on the edges of society, such as prisoners and the disfigured.

Tony Fomison Grotto Road, Onehunga, Auckland. Image Mark Adams

Living in Auckland for much of his life, he had a strong connection to the local Samoan community and in 1980 made the decision to be tattooed with a Samoan pe’a.  This and his response to the Springbok tour of 1981was part of the artists unconventional or subversive approach to social and political issues

Forman includes numerous quotes from friends and fellow artists along with reviews which allude to Fomison’ s art as being related to distant periods rather than addressing contemporary issues  so that Francis Pound said of his work that it was “akin to that of a seventeenth century primitive” while Hamish Keith wrote that his figures were “sinister and unpleasant… giving of an Old Master complex” and Peter Simpson said he “has something of the impoverished yet eloquent beauty of late Michelangelo”

Fomison led a challenging personal life, which often could be seen in his paintings. As Ian Wedde says, ‘Fomison persisted with thinking and with making art out of his thoughts.’ Following a trip to Europe in the mid 1960s, and a short stint in institutions, Fomison began to paint people on the edges of society, such as prisoners and the disfigured. He would repeatedly return to the theme of the ‘outsider’. Fomison’s work was also often ‘socially committed’, protest the state of the world.

In his career spanning three decades, Fomison produced some of New Zealand’s most significant paintings and drawings, which seemed to incorporate elements of his own  physical journey as well as the spiritual and aesthetic journey, linking ideas that he developed along with his whimsical and dark attitude to life.

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HEDY! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamar

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

HEDY! The Life & Inventions of Hedy Lamar

Written and performed by Heather Massie

Q Theatre

March 13- 16

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

While she never got an Oscar, Hedy Lamarr was considered the most beautiful woman in the world and was one of the great movie stars of the mid twentieth century. She starred in many films including “Samsom and Delilah and the Czech film “Ecstasy” which featured a controversial orgasm scene which was banned in many countries.

She was divorced six times, making her one of the most divorced women of the twentieth century, a distinction beaten only by Elizabeth Taylor with seven.

But, in many ways, her greatest distinction was her invention (along with George Antheil} of  a “Secret Communication System,” which was a radio-guided device with anti-jamming frequencies which would have had the capacity to interfere with torpedo guidance systems during WWI. The US Navy declined to make use of it.

This device is a component of present-day satellite technology and cellular phone technology.

Her work as an inventor was eventually recognized in 1997 with the Sixth Annual Pioneer Award bestowed on her by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

These are some of the highlights of her career which were revealed in Heather Massie’s one-woman autobiographical show, “Hedy Lamarr”.

Lamarr reminisces about her life, her father, her time in Vienna and later her career in Hollywood. There are her relationships with the various men in her life – an armaments producer, a count, Louis B Meyer and various director and actors.

Many of them were presented by Heather Massie using a of range voices to create to give depth to her performance, although she gave most of the men pretty much the same clichéd accent. Her account of Jimmy Stewart, however, was a delightfully, breathless portrait of the actor.

The various events and activities referred to showed the range of Lamarr’s interests and encounters with her quotes indicating a shrewd mind and a keen observer of life.

Massie managed to turn Lamarr into a remarkable complicated but simple figure who seems to know a lot about life, men and the workings of the world as well as making shrewd observation about her life and her inventions.

However, Massie galloped through her “tutorial” about her guidance system with not much time to appreciate just how important the invention could have been to the war effort.

Massie’s presentation has Lamarr engage the various people in her life over the phone or in having on stage conversations so effectively that in retrospect it seems they were with there on stage.

She also engaged with the audience as a whole and in many cases with individual audience members, a technique which worked as a means of creating Lamarr as well as providing a classy example of how to create a character.

To subscribe or follow New Zealand Arts Review site – www.nzartsreview.org.

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