Commentary
Turn Around and I’m Gone Again

Turn Around and I’m Gone Again

The public lives of artworks can be occasional and itinerant—they emerge from the cosy sameness of storage into fresh locations and contexts. Many make their first public appearances alongside siblings from their maker’s studio, but later find themselves in very different company. While some resolutely maintain their identity no matter how or where they are shown, others open up to additional associations and meanings. Fittingly for a show about the power of alternative identities, several of the works in Dummies & Doppelgängers have evolved over time, shapeshifting into new lives or likenesses.

Interview
Toloa Tales

Toloa Tales

In November and December 2023, artists and friends Sione Tuívailala Monū (Aotearoa, Australia, Tonga) and Edith Amituanai (Aotearoa, Sāmoa) went to Sāmoa together to make new video works for their forthcoming exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū: Toloa Tales. With extended family and now her mother and aunt living there, Edith has visited several times before. However, this was the first time for Sione. The relationship between Tonga and Sāmoa is one of ancient rivalry and connection, with Tonga more recently exerting colonial force in the region before European and American colonisation. Edith and Sione talked to Bulletin about their time in Sāmoa, their process of making, and how their understandings of cultural identity and migration have changed over time.

My Favourite
Dry September and the Dutch Funeral

Dry September and the Dutch Funeral

Towards the end of last century I was teaching at Christ’s College. At lunchtime, like quite a few of the boys, I used to go through a gate in a brick wall to the Botanic Gardens to smoke. Then, especially if it was cold, I’d often wander, to no great purpose, through the Robert MacDougal Art Gallery.

Commentary
What Can Exhibitions Tell Us?

What Can Exhibitions Tell Us?

In a corner of Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, two self portraits are placed as if in conversation with one another. Made by Allie Eagle and Olivia Spencer Bower in 1974 and 1950 respectively, the pairing creates a striking vignette, and hints at some of the important themes that drive this exhibition.

Interview
A Shift in Place

A Shift in Place

After Encountering Aotearoa opened at Dunedin Public Art Gallery I spent time reflecting on whether I was happy with the body of work and how it conveyed the journey I had taken with my Pāpā and my relationship with the whenua.

Commentary
Down and Gritty

Down and Gritty

The art history of Aotearoa New Zealand includes a subgenre of landscape painting that is often under recognised, but enlivens the story of this country in gritty, illuminating ways. Investigating the twentieth-century painters who focused on the urban and industrial exposes a rich seam of material, with subject-matter ranging from gasworks, hydroelectric plants and foundries to factories, warehouses and cityscapes, workshops, wharves and railway yards. The artists are a combination of well known and less familiar names, but it is notable that this direction developed most strongly among the Ōtautahi Christchurch-trained: two-thirds of the artists in From Here on the Ground attended the Canterbury College School of Art, where many also taught. It was a training ground regarded as among the most progressive in the Southern Hemisphere for several decades in the first half of the century.

Commentary
Marilynn Webb

Marilynn Webb

He mana ā whenua, he mana wahine

Female power comes from the earth

Commentary
Abandoned Ancestors

Abandoned Ancestors

Between 1971 and 1978, a selection of twelve early oil portraits came into the collection – a finely painted lineup of mostly British sitters, some named and some unidentified, whose arrival can be seen in a number of different ways.

Commentary
Encountering Aotearoa: Whenua, Place and Practice

Encountering Aotearoa: Whenua, Place and Practice

I stand staring at a painting of Motupōhue Bluff Hill. Being from the far south myself, its shape is instantly recognisable, its silhouette painted in vibrant colours that mirror the way light reflects on the real Motupōhue. The paint used to create this familiar scene is made from whenua, and includes pukepoto, the rich blue pigment that comes from the land near the hill: my whenua. There’s a resonance between the work and its materials that makes it special, layered with connections that reflect my own identity and experiences, reaffirming memories and a sense of belonging.

My Favourite
Toss Woollaston: Untitled [Quentin (Kin) Woollaston Shearing]

Toss Woollaston: Untitled [Quentin (Kin) Woollaston Shearing]

“Teddy you fucking mongrel! Stay in your place, so help me you fuzzy prick!” my four-year-old self shouted at my hapless toy bear during Christmas lunch in 1981.