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Article
A Tale of Two Chiefs
If you have recently visited He Taonga Rangatira: Noble Treasures at the Gallery you will have been struck by Fiona Pardington's two large photographic portraits of lifelike busts of Ngāi tahu tipuna (ancestors).
Collection
Fiona Pardington Portrait of a life-cast of ‘Pouka-lem’, Aotearoa New Zealand
Labelled ‘Poukalem’, and believed to depict the leading Ngāi Tahu chief Piuraki, also known as John Love Tikao, this powerful life-cast plaster likeness was made by the Parisian phrenologist Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier at Ōtākou (Otago) in late March 1840.
The casting occurred two months before Piuraki became a signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi at Ōnuku near Akaroa on 30 May 1840. Piuraki was fluent in French and English, having lived for two years in Bordeaux, France, then for five years in London. This followed a period working with a whaling crew, where he took the name John Love. This in turn came after his release from imprisonment on Kapiti Island (near Wellington), having been captured during Te Rauparaha’s 1831 raid on Kaiapoi pā (fortified village) in North Canterbury.
Piuraki became an important advocate for Ngāi Tahu in highlighting to ensuing colonial governments the enforced land sales and broken promises that left his people effectively landless. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
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Fiona Pardington Portrait of a Life-cast, possibly of ‘Taha-tahala’ [possibly Takatahara], Aotearoa New Zealand
Across her career, Fiona Pardington has a history of working with found objects. This portrait acts to reclaim an image believed to be of her ancestor, Takatahara from Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula. The subject was introduced to the plaster-cast technique of naturalist and phrenologist Pierre Marie Alexandre Dumoutier at Ōtakou during one of his visits to Aotearoa in the early 1800s. Often mistaken for death masks, life-casts were in fact made with the subject’s participation. Takatahara was known as a robust toa (warrior) who fought in, and lived well past, the battle with Te Rauparaha at Ōnawe pā (fortified village).
(Te Wheke, 2020)
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Conrad Martens Sydney from the North Shore
Conrad Martens left England for Rio de Janeiro in 1833. By December had reached Montevideo, Uruguay, where he joined Captain FitzRoy and Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle, becoming ship’s artist on a survey of South American coasts. In 1835, Martens settled in Sydney and became an admired landscape painter who also produced popular hand-coloured lithographs.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
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Charles Meryon Le Ministère de la Marine
Charles Meryon’s fantastical Parisian scene presents the French Admiralty building with a flying horde being delivered from the far ends of the globe. The crowd below is thrown into disarray as Roman charioteers, whales and whaleboats, a waka with sails, an anchor, serpents, cowboys and horses with fishtails prepare for landing.
Meryon’s impaired mental state in this period is the usual explanation given for this extraordinary etching. At the same time, it may be viewed as an image laden with personal symbolism as the confounding facts, fantasies and errors of the past make their perplexing return.
Meryon spent three years in Akaroa from 1843–46 as a young naval cadet, protecting the fledgling French settlement. Although this particular colonising plan did not succeed, the streetlamps of Paris were fed a regular supply of whale oil from Banks Peninsula in this period. For Meryon these were formative years and regularly revisited in his imagination. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
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Charles Meryon Nouvelle-Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks. Etat de la petite colonie Française d’Akaroa. Vers 1845 - Voyage du Rhin.
Described as the father of modern etching, French naval officer Charles Meryon was one of the most important artists to work in Waitaha / Canterbury during the colonial era. He served on the Rhin, stationed at Akaroa between 1843 and 1846, to look out for the French settlement there. Meryon made numerous pencil studies at Akaroa which he later used as the basis for this series of etchings completed back in Paris during the 1860s. He planned to publish these and other images of the Pacific in an album, which unfortunately he never completed. The story of the French attempt to settle Te Waipounamu / the South Island is a fascinating chapter in New Zealand’s history. A French whaling captain, Jean Langlois, purchased 30,000 acres from Kāi Tahu on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula in 1838 and returned to France to get government support to establish a French colony at Akaroa. It was from here that he hoped the French would be able to expand throughout the rest of the South Island. A company was formed and sixty- three French and German settlers set sail on the Comte de Paris. They arrived at Akaroa in August 1840 only to find a Union Jack flying at Takapūneke / Green’s Point signalling that British sovereignty had already been claimed. Today, Akaroa continues to retain something of a French flavour.
(Pickaxes and shovels, 17 February – 5 August 2018)
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Charles Meryon Nouvelle Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks, 1845. Pointe dite des Charbonniers, à Akaroa, Pêche à la Seine
Described as the father of modern etching, French naval officer Charles Meryon was one of the most important artists to work in Waitaha / Canterbury during the colonial era. He served on the Rhin, stationed at Akaroa between 1843 and 1846, to look out for the French settlement there. Meryon made numerous pencil studies at Akaroa which he later used as the basis for this series of etchings completed back in Paris during the 1860s. He planned to publish these and other images of the Pacific in an album, which unfortunately he never completed. The story of the French attempt to settle Te Waipounamu / the South Island is a fascinating chapter in New Zealand’s history. A French whaling captain, Jean Langlois, purchased 30,000 acres from Kāi Tahu on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula in 1838 and returned to France to get government support to establish a French colony at Akaroa. It was from here that he hoped the French would be able to expand throughout the rest of the South Island. A company was formed and sixty- three French and German settlers set sail on the Comte de Paris. They arrived at Akaroa in August 1840 only to find a Union Jack flying at Takapūneke / Green’s Point signalling that British sovereignty had already been claimed. Today, Akaroa continues to retain something of a French flavour.
(Pickaxes and shovels, 17 February – 5 August 2018)
Collection
Charles Meryon Nouvelle Zélande, Greniers indigènes et Habitations à Akaroa (Presqu’île de Banks, 1845
Described as the father of modern etching, French naval officer Charles Meryon was one of the most important artists to work in Waitaha / Canterbury during the colonial era. He served on the Rhin, stationed at Akaroa between 1843 and 1846, to look out for the French settlement there. Meryon made numerous pencil studies at Akaroa which he later used as the basis for this series of etchings completed back in Paris during the 1860s. He planned to publish these and other images of the Pacific in an album, which unfortunately he never completed. The story of the French attempt to settle Te Waipounamu / the South Island is a fascinating chapter in New Zealand’s history. A French whaling captain, Jean Langlois, purchased 30,000 acres from Kāi Tahu on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula in 1838 and returned to France to get government support to establish a French colony at Akaroa. It was from here that he hoped the French would be able to expand throughout the rest of the South Island. A company was formed and sixty- three French and German settlers set sail on the Comte de Paris. They arrived at Akaroa in August 1840 only to find a Union Jack flying at Takapūneke / Green’s Point signalling that British sovereignty had already been claimed. Today, Akaroa continues to retain something of a French flavour.
(Pickaxes and shovels, 17 February – 5 August 2018)
Collection
Tony Fomison Night time, Amuri Bluff
Tony Fomison’s luminous, night time view of Haumuri Bluff on the Kaikōura coast is a weighted landscape little-related to scenic appreciation. It carries a sense of time and of Fomison’s connections to this locality and its past.
In 1959, while a twenty-year-old sculpture student at the University of Canterbury, Fomison began working with the Canterbury Museum as an assistant ethnologist and archaeologist. He worked on extensive archaeological explorations of Māori settlements and early whaling sites near Kaikōura and on Banks Peninsula, and surveyed rock art sites throughout Canterbury. Haumuri, a Māori settlement site, was also the setting for a short-lived whaling station from 1844.
Something of Fomison’s motivation in painting is conveyed in his comment: “Given that the practitioner has a knowledge of our history, it can also be an opportunity to project an uncontaminated view of the past into the future.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
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Peter Robinson Cascade
Peter Robinson’s Cascade becomes an increasingly curious artefact within this selection of largely historical works. At the same time it strangely embodies the collective idea of kā honoka: a multitude of connections, relationships and links.
Robinson is a Ngāi Tahu artist with an enduring interest in the adaptation and lineage of ideas. His sculpturally satisfying polystyrene mass with its tumbling chains and weights sparks multiple imaginative associations. These might be immediately evident in relation to local maritime and whaling stories, but can take many directions. The ideas in the work, like Robinson’s chosen medium, may expand and reshape to find their own purpose. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)