Commentary
Commentary
Watch Your Tongue
I te tīmatanga ko te hiahia Mai i te hiahia ko te mahara
Mai i te mahara ko te whakaaro Ka puta ko te kupu e.
In the beginning was the desire From the desire came the remembrance
From the remembrance came the conscious thought From the conscious thought came the word.
Rangimotuhia Kātene
Commentary
Silver Screen
Writing on the virtues of filmic possibility, Susan Sontag identifies that “the distinctive cinematic unit is not the image, but the principle of connection between the images: the relation of a ‘shot’ to the one that preceded and the one that comes after.” It is this ability to manipulate the structure of film that makes the medium special; editing, Sontag proposes, is the reason for film to exist at all. The continuation or dissolution of one scene into the next constitutes the materiality of the moving image; it is defined by the seams where it also might be undone. As such, an artist’s choice to work with moving image comes from an appreciation of its distinct characteristics.
Commentary
Spring Time is Heart-break
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū’s new exhibition Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa takes its title from one of six poems written as memorials by Ursula Bethell after the death of her partner Effie Pollen. The couple’s relationship mirrored the seasonal changes in the garden they tended together during the decade that Bethell was writing poetry on Ngā Kohatu Whakarakaraka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua, the Port Hills overlooking Ōtautahi Christchurch. For the poet, signs of spring became a bittersweet reminder of her lost love. Reading Bethell’s work today, her evocation of intense feelings and embeddedness with the land not only reflects the ethos of our present time, but also resonates with many of the works in the exhibition. Bethell claims that we are kin with the environment, foreshadowing ideas of human/non-human interconnectedness and echoing tangata whenua understandings of whakapapa to the whenua. Artist Aliyah Winter brought Bethell to our attention while she was conducting research for a new work; our choice of title was made to encompass seasons, temporality and emotion, as might be applied to contemporary practice in Aotearoa.
Commentary
Capturing the Airs
In the archive there is a stillness, an air of silence animated by the low hum of electronics: servers buzzing, computer screens flickering, wires, old analogue equipment. I load an audio file into a software program with a few clicks of the mouse. Its waveform unfurls on my screen, a horizontal axis of blue lines accentuated by vertical peaks and troughs, rendering the singing breath and its energetic highs and lows. I press play and ambient sounds flood the speakers. The magnetic tape hisses, jumps and crackles as it winds along, the swell of laughter, singing voices, traffic passing by – inflections of a bygone era. I’m transported to the memory of learning mā'ulu'ulu, a Tongan group dance, as a young girl. After church on Sundays, in the middle of winter, we would pack into the cold hall for rehearsal, kept warm by the movement of bodies swaying together.
Commentary
Ka Oho te Taonga, Ka Oho te Tangata
In 2014, a team of University of Waikato researchers led by Linda Tuhiwai Smith CNZM travelled to Norway to present their research at the New Zealand Studies Association Conference, held at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo. The group included myself and Aroha Mitchell (researchers, artists and kairaranga), Rangi Mataamua (researcher and scholar of Māori astronomy) and Haki Tuaupiki (researcher, navigator/waka sailor).
Linda knew of my fascination with Te Rā and encouraged me to organise a visit to the British Museum while we were overseas. Emails flew back and forth between Aotearoa and London, and fortunately the times aligned and we arranged to spend two days at the museum documenting the construction of, and reflecting on the function of, this taonga.
Commentary
Te Rā at Christchurch Art Gallery
On 8 July 2023, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū opened Te Rā: The Māori Sail to the public. The opening was a celebratory event to which manuhiri travelled from around Aotearoa, excited by the opportunity to view the only known customary Māori sail in existence. The development of the exhibition required the knowledge and skills of numerous experts from the Gallery team and elsewhere in Aotearoa, Australia and England. This photo-essay documents the work that went into the installation, and some of the people that made it happen.
Commentary
Whenua is a Portal
Manawa mai tēnei i Ahuone mai
Manawa mai tēnei i whenuatia
Manawa mai tēnei he kapunga oneone
Tēnei te mauri
o Papatūānuku,
o Tūparimaunga,
o Parawhenuamea,
o Ukurangi
E whakaata mai nei e
Kōkiri!
Commentary
Verses and Visions of Ship Nails and Tail Feathers
The ways that we curate history can make all the difference in the ways we value each other now. As I round the corner on a decade spent working in heritage and curatorial collection management, my beloved museum wrapped in its gothic stone cloak is under decant. It seems the tide is always high, and my mind needs to revel in the freedom of writing in a foreign tongue about that which matters to me. So here is a collection of verses and visions, data and drama about art and artefacts intended to counter what I would describe as the lingering monocular view of histories and heritage material.
Commentary
String Games
“If you think about it, digital, it’s something you play with string, your fingers and a language of computers, strings of binary code. The interplay of old and new. ”
Commentary
Cut It Out
Make no bones about it, Ink on Paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Printmakers of the Modern Era is an exhibition I have long wanted to curate. I acquired my first print direct from Ralph Hotere when I was an art history student here in Christchurch many years ago. Hotere was the artist that piqued my interest in printmaking, but it is the Aotearoa New Zealand printmakers of the 1910s through to the 1950s that I love the most. Ink on Paper focuses on a generation of artists that were at the forefront of the medium when, following the printmaking revival in Britain, printmaking in Aotearoa was increasingly becoming accepted as an art form rather than simply a method of reproduction.