Ahead of the Aotearoa Art Fair, Sally Blundell asks New Zealand artists about their favourite local artwork and why it moves them.
LAURENCE ABERHART, photographer
To me, there are two categories to this question: work that I admire, and work that I covet.
The work I most admire is Robin White’s painting Summer Grass. When I saw it for the first time in very humble surroundings, I thought, “How brave. How beautiful.”
The subject of the painting, which is never stated except in the most oblique way, through imagery, alludes to the Japanese POW riot and deaths in the Featherston camp they were imprisoned in, in which 48 prisoners and a guard were killed in February 1943. I was moved by the fact that the artist was choosing a most unpalatable subject, one that had almost been ignored in our collective social history, and delivered her message and memorial in the most beautiful painterly and seemingly understated manner. Epic in size and subject.
The artwork I most covet, though, is a painting by Bill Hammond, Verdi Verde. Every time I see it, I feel an outright lust for it and want to wrap myself inside its warm, green lusciousness.
FIONA PARDINGTON, photographer
My most beloved artworks in Aotearoa are the Māori rock drawings winding through the highlands of Te Waipounamu. Those lumps of limestone, charged up with psychic energy, with all the little underground rivulets and trickles of water running through them into the aquifer and then into those cool, dark, quiet places – the cavities and caves, the womb of Papatūānuku where we all come from and to where we all return – and then those beautiful, sensuous patterns and drawings.
It’s like I’ve stuck my finger into an electrical outlet: I’m plugged into the mana of my Kāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe tīpuna. I’m seeing through their eyes.
You can see moa and pouākai as they would have seen them. Both birds would have been crashing around after each other in the bush around where I live in the Hunter Hills in South Canterbury. It’s whakapapa.
REUBEN PATERSON, painter
There’s nothing like sharing a great city in friendship and perfect company – and I have three Judy Darraghs with me in New York because I couldn’t part with their company.
Hanging beside my bed is one of my most treasured works, knowing Judy’s hands have magically composed crystals and wax into playful pools of glue ooze.
On my second day here, I was told that Manhattan had been built on its own bed of crystals. Deep in the bedrock quartz, dumortierite and kyanite crystals were formed 450 million years ago in a collision between what is now the east coast of North America and the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. This is a new space where I can’t see crystals, the southern stars or friendships, but they are here.
SHANNON TE AO, artist/writer
I’ve been compelled by Wi Taepa’s work since first learning about Ngā Kaihanga Uku some years ago. The work of this collective of Māori clay workers has continued to hold significance since its formation during the 1980s. Honu, like most kupu Māori, carries layered meaning – referring to the turtle and also ways of being and feeling. Taonga like these hold a similarly layered significance when you are lucky enough to live alongside them. Honu references a kōauau (small flute), something to potentially be played, and more deeply, something that charges the space that it exists within.
JULIA MORISON, visual artist, and ISABELLA LOUDON, sculptor
We connected on Black/white, a Grant Lingard work on display at the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2023. For Isabella, it was the first time encountering this work; Julia had first seen the diptych at the James Paul Gallery in Christchurch in 1985.
The work is made from rough demolition timber, spiked with the rusty nails that recall another purpose in a previous life, hastily joined together but with utmost precision.
These two cannily crafted mates are opposites in many ways: one dark, introvert yet viscerally exposed, slightly buckled and with nails pointing inwards as if to attack its own self; the other white, shorter, extrovert, yet closed up and defensive of what is held within. The inside is the outside. These contradictions in their kinship seem to be the point – pointing to grace, held taut in tension, of our human condition whether as a unique individual or as a community.
TĀME ITI, activist/artist
Te Whai-a-te-Motu, the 1870s-80s tīpuna whare (ancestral house) by Te Whenuanui and Te Whare Kotua, is my kind of art. It tells our story; Tūhoe’s kōrero of ranatiratana and mana motuhake.
These tīpuna were ranatira, military minds, and tohuna, leading Tūhoe through upheaval, fighting foreign invaders, housing and feeding the people, but they still created art.
Te Whai-a-te-Motu is a political statement and functional art. The whakairo (carving) and symbolism, including modern motifs introduced for the first time, speak of Tūhoe identity, resistance, and unity.
Today, it remains a symbol of strength – a place to gather, kōrero, waiata, and honour tīpuna. The wairua and mauri of Tūhoe forever resound within its walls and within Te Urewera. Art, Tūhoe style.
MARK BRAUNIAS, painter
“I could have done better.” So wrote Colin McCahon after he had just finished installing his mural, Waterfall theme & variations, at the University of Otago Library in Dunedin. He need not have worried. It’s a big expansive sprawling work chock full of painterly invention and sheer force of will. The title could easily be called The Theology of (Colin’s) Painting. There probably is no work in his canon as complicated in painting/design terms as this mural. His full hand of cards is laid out on the table. The work is also problematic as hell. That’s why it’s my favourite. Something is off. It probably has something to do with the absurd cramped space where it is currently installed. The devil is in the detail, however, and viewed panel by panel, you get knocked, shocked and astonished by McCahon’s extravagant facility and sheer badass grunty elegance. Go and see it first thing in the morning during university holidays – you’ll have the entire room and work to yourself. Colin has something to say to you and he don’t need no words. Just your eyes.
JOHN PARKER, potter
Strange, maybe, that one of my favourite New Zealand artworks is a piece of industrial design.
Electrical insulators possess a quiet beauty, a simplicity, a humility, an anonymity, if you will. They are heavy and robust but elegant and delicate, made from an inert material to perform the necessary job of ensuring our continuing power supply.
They are the Bauhaus epitome of “form follows function” by creating a difficult path to prevent electrical current flowing where it is not wanted.
I am fascinated by the chemistry and the construction process: in my ceramics process it is something to strive for – to out-machine the machine.
EMILY HARTLEY-SKUDDER, multi-media artist
It’s an exceptionally hard task to name my favourite artwork from Aotearoa, so I’ll have to choose the first that came to mind: Judy Darragh’s Birth of Barbie. Judy is a huge hero of mine, and she makes the most wonderfully cheeky, delicious artwork, often compiled from her large collection of plastic found objects.
Darragh’s update of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus consists of a circular panel covered in black crushed velvet, bedazzled with tiny mirrored discs and glow-in-the-dark starfish. An electric fan blows wind through the viewer’s hair, standing in for the deities in the original. A rubber fig leaf makes no attempt to cover the bright orange cock and balls. The famous doll perches on a plastic clamshell in the centre, her hair crusty with white paint and her arms missing like a marble statue. Then there’s the twin foetuses and golden locks of hair sprouting from plastic flowers either side.
Barbie was one of the first grown-up dolls, and Venus was birthed from the sea foam as a fully grown woman. Barbie is the Venus of our times; with the most beautiful, ideal body to aspire to: a twisted icon of sexuality and womanhood, whether you like it or not.
CHERYL LUCAS, ceramicist
All your life as a potter you can aim to produce something that is mind-blowingly gorgeous, properly functional and also meaningful. Whether you ever do it or not is another matter.
Not so for Chris Weaver, who made his brilliant black Teapot in 1993. It is a conundrum; on the one hand it is a modern, sleek shape of a fully functional teapot and yet it reeks of grandma and her iron heating on the coal range.
Simultaneously swept up in a wave of nostalgia and shocked into a lesson on modern design, I certainly needed a cuppa tea and a lie down when I first set eyes on this piece – 30 years on and the feeling is just the same.
The Aotearoa Art Fair showcases the work of artists represented by more than 30 galleries across a range of mediums. Viaduct Events Centre, Auckland, April 18-21.
