At the end of last month, artist Alexis Hunter died, at age 65, of motor neuron disease. Artists and institutions described her as important and talented. I confess my ignorance; I had never heard of her. So I went in search of what I had been missing.
Based in London since 1972, she was the McCahon student and Elam graduate who made good overseas, yet who enjoyed her regular visits back home. That's one story. Another story is that of the technical innovator, showing cinematic sequential photographs, and unpredictably adding figurative, psycho-symbolic painting to her output in the 80s. She was scoffed at, remembers Auckland Art Gallery senior curator Ron Brownson, for using the plebeian photocopier as an art tool.
But the most compelling story is that of the fearless leading light in the feminist art movement, making "some of the most radical work of the 70s in the UK," according to one critic.
She photographed men's tattoos in the street, close-ups of their forearms hanging by their crotches. These and other images are erotic, presenting a desiring "female gaze" - surprising a world used to seeing only women as sexy camera fodder in art and advertising.
Approach to Fear XIII: Pain - Destruction of Cause (1977) shows the burning of a silver high heel shoe. "It was glamorous and dangerous at the same time," remembers artist Judy Darragh, a decade Hunter's junior, for whom New Zealand artists like Hunter, Allie Eagle and Rhondda Bosworth were "refreshing and really exciting after an art history education full of male landscape painting".
