Her work was admired by Ralph Hotere. She was celebrated in verse by Hone Tuwhare and Cilla McQueen. Her teaching shaped thousands of art students, and she was honoured with awards, exhibitions, and interviews. Her pastel images of Fiordland, in shades of silver, olive and blue, have become iconic. And yet one could argue that Marilynn Webb’s achievements remain undervalued in Aotearoa, especially outside Otago and Southland.
“Being Māori, a woman, living ‘regionally’, and an artist who works on paper are all factors that result in her artwork being readily dismissed by many public institutions,” says artist Bridget Reweti. “But despite this, her work is loved and continually receives the credit it deserves from artists.”
Reweti, Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds are co-curators of Folded in the Hills, a major retrospective of Webb’s art from the late 1960s to the mid 2000s that currently fills the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s vast first floor. The exhibition, which travels to Christchurch in June, and the handsome accompanying catalogue are an attempt to shift public thinking about Webb’s remarkable body of work.
The seeds of the exhibition were sown in 2018, when Gutsell and Hammonds curated (with input from Webb) a selection of the gallery’s holdings of her work. “I guess that was a catalyst for realising that the time had come for a much more expansive look at Marilynn’s career,” says Hammonds. Webb died in August 2021, as plans developed for the current retrospective.
The exhibition has been organised meticulously. Most of the walls are painted white, accentuated at key points with a suitably Fiordland-esque smoky teal, which acts as “a connecting fibre through the spaces”, says Gutsell. All 140 works on display have been reframed in identical white matting, white frames, and non-reflective glass. “We wanted the work to be the focus,” she says.
This approach also calls attention to Webb’s medium of choice: paper. “You can see the texture of the works without any of the other visual noise,” says Hammonds. In some cases, the paper is crisp white; in others, it is darkened by exposure to the seasons or rippled by the application of heavy ink. While paper is sometimes considered a limiting medium, Folded in the Hills persuasively shows Webb’s remarkable versatility as an artist and maker.
Beginnings
Born in 1937 in Auckland’s Grey Lynn, Webb spent her early years in Ōpōtiki, Bay of Plenty. Through her father, a mechanic, she had ancestral links to the Welsh border region. Through her mother, she was descended from Moe Ngaherehere, the 47th signatory of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
In 1957, after two years at Ardmore Teachers College, Webb was selected for a third year of art study in Dunedin, a consequence of the Art and Craft scheme, the government programme led by Gordon Tovey that encouraged art teachers to also be active practitioners. True to the Tovey philosophy, Webb had her first show that same year at Stewart’s Coffee House in the Octagon. The Otago Daily Times reported that: “Miss Marilynn Webb … has a number of works on show which are causing favourable comment by customers.”
After completing her studies, Webb moved back north and taught in Auckland and Northland. She showed her work at the New Vision Gallery, a champion of New Zealand printmaking based in Auckland’s still-lamented His Majesty’s Arcade. She travelled in the 1960s to Europe, Morocco and central Australia, where she was introduced to new artistic ideas. The immense Australian vistas were especially significant for her.
A key moment for Webb was receiving the University of Otago Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1974. She was the third woman (after Tanya Ashken and Marté Szirmay) and the first wāhine Māori to receive the award, which provides artists a studio and salary for a full year. She reconnected with Hotere (whom she knew through their mutual participation in the Tovey scheme), and was soon part of a lively community of artists, including Hotere, Tuwhare and McQueen. Otago became home. She gave birth to a son, Ben, in 1976, and divided her time between Dunedin and a property she bought on Lake Mahinerangi, about an hour’s drive west of Dunedin.
Although Webb occasionally painted in oils or watercolours, she devoted most of her energies to being a printmaker, using the form to record her impressions of Otago settings and to call attention to the precarity of our natural environment. As Folded in the Hills makes clear, Webb was also interested in testing the limits of what a print can be.
A democratic art
Printmaking is one of New Zealand’s richest and most underappreciated art forms. An image may be engraved onto many materials: a woodblock, a metal plate, linoleum, even a potato. It is then printed on paper in a limited number of impressions: 10, 20, whatever number the artist decides (and the engraving allows). The artist then usually signs and numbers each work.
Since the artist has multiple images of the same work to sell, the price is generally less than an original watercolour or oil painting. This affordability – as well as the long European tradition of the print being used for political satire – has given it the reputation for being a “democratic” art form. One needn’t sell the car to own a handmade print.
Webb often printed works in series. Sometimes, they followed market expectations: they were numbered, near-exact copies. But Webb was also interested in challenging the form’s boundaries. As Hammonds notes, Webb could be “quite subversive as a printmaker”.
Many of her prints unite at least two different processes. Incised lines of landscape, cut into linoleum and then hand-printed, might be combined with splashes of a hand-painted sky. Or swirling cloud shapes might be embossed and lightly shaded, so that the clouds stand out above the engraved landforms and take on a third dimension.
The resulting images, made in the 1970s, are an appealing marriage of new and old. Webb’s first viewers must have noted a touch of early McCahon in the curves of her engraved hills. But the swipes of stormy colour across the sky and the substantiality given to clouds through embossing were unlike anything else in New Zealand printmaking.
This wilful challenge to artistic conventions is evident in Webb’s tussock series. She begins with an engraved, rectangular enclosure for the image. But the actual tussocks are hand-painted in various colours, representing different seasons or weather conditions. Occasionally, the colours spill beyond the upper print border, creating a sense of clouds and sky above the engraved and painted fields.
Politics and environment
Webb’s concern for the environment was a longstanding aspect of her work. The exhibition highlights the remarkable breadth of her artistic responses, from gentle persuasion to acerbic satire. The former is evident in the 1980-81 Aramoana Fossil Series, created in response to a plan for an aluminium smelter at the mouth of Otago Harbour.
With great delicacy, Webb embossed uninked images of native plant species endangered by the smelter’s emissions. This startling use of a technique associated with sentimental greeting cards or dated wallpaper to envisage the ghostly fossils of the future creates a powerful statement on the dangers of losing the essence of our natural identity before we even notice it is gone.
In 1982, Webb created her most caustic work of protest art: her cookbook from hell, Taste Before Eating. Commissioned by the Dowse Art Museum, this is Webb’s sharpest critique of the Muldoon government’s “Think Big” projects: 11 oversized, garish images of inedible creations. Each is accompanied by an Aunt Daisy-inspired recipe, though no one would want to taste “Aramoana Soup” (“Find a dead albatross, a dead swan, a dead shag …”), “High Country Flambé” (“Burn it, outside, until it is charred”), or “Mining Crumble” (“Make deep ridges over the top and form tracks, peaks, scars and craters”).
Webb made a different kind of political statement in her 1985 Self Portrait (for the memory of Simon Buis). The print was part of a series critiquing French nuclear tests in the Pacific, hence the doomsday countdown in the lower part of the picture. Reworking an image taken by Buis, a friend and photographer who had been murdered in 1980, Webb created one of Aotearoa’s great artist portraits. As with Rita Angus’s memorable images of herself, Webb gazes directly and solemnly at the viewer. The close-cropped face and pink and black colours conjure the time – one could easily imagine this as an 80s album cover. But the context of nuclear testing and the July 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior augment the image’s power, tying an act of personal remembrance – the loss of a friend in a meaningless act of violence – to the regional and global threat from nuclear catastrophe. With her crimsoned irises directed on us, Webb literally and figuratively sees red.
Imagining the land
From the 1990s, she expanded her imaginative geography in series exploring Fiordland, the Mataura Valley, and the Waitaki River. Several were commissioned by public galleries in Gore and Invercargill, reminders of the importance of our smaller art institutions. A selection of these works provides an energising burst of colour and movement in the exhibition’s final room.
Though she continued working on paper, she often preferred pastels to the printing press for these later creations. Several of her crowd-pleasing Fiordland pastels are on display. Perhaps even more striking are the pastel drawings she made for Gore’s Eastern Southland Gallery, celebrating the Mataura Valley. With their tempestuous skies and swirls of unexpected colour, these works recall Edvard Munch and other Symbolist artists from a century before.
But certain aspects of these images suggest that Webb was looking to indigenous ideas and thinking for inspiration. Examine almost any landscape painted in the European tradition and you will see vestiges of humanity: a cottage, a fence, a shepherd herding sheep. The Western history of landscape painting is also the history of domesticating a landscape.
Early colonial artists often painted Australia and the South Island as “terra nullius,” as if no one had previously inhabited the land, and their images became propaganda for British expansion. But Webb’s goal in emptying her landscapes of human presence seems quite different. As art historian Bridie Lonie has argued, Webb resists claims of ownership and hierarchy, rejecting ideas of mastery over the natural world. These are lands, seas and skies that are doing just fine without us.
If decolonisation is implicit in these landscapes, it becomes explicit in three late series that close the exhibition, In Hodges’ Wake (1998), Place Names Suite (2003), and the collaborative Waitaki River (2005). Deploying motifs that Webb had developed over more than 30 years, these large woodcuts call attention to histories of colonisation and the displacement of Māori. But in the predominant shades of green, they also serve as celebrations of Webb’s adopted land, Te Waipounamu.
Legacies
Folded in the Hills offers a persuasive case for Webb’s position in New Zealand art history, but even such an expansive exhibition can do only so much. Her legacy lives on through the remarkable teachers and artists (among them Simon Kaan and Inge Doesburg) whom she trained during her years at Otago Polytechnic School of Art, as well as in the many young people who gained a greater appreciation for art through her participation in the Art and Craft scheme. Her sadly prescient concerns about environmental degradation and her interest in the long, complex history of Te Waipounamu provide models for creative forms of protest and resistance.
In her best works, Webb created images that make us see the world a little differently. Recently, during a beach walk, I was struck by the way the tidal marks, etched out below the strandline, resembled the mountains of Webb’s Fiordland pastels. It was as if all of St Kilda beach was an immense Marilynn Webb creation. It happened again on a bright, windy visit to her beloved Lake Mahinerangi, when the clouds took on the crisp clearness of an embossed print.
In these moments, I realised that Webb’s landscapes had subtly changed the way I see my environment; or perhaps she captured something ineffable in the landscape that I could now see only because of her work. Many viewers of Folded in the Hills will owe a similar debt to Webb’s rich imagination.
