Louis Auguste de Sainson

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)

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)

John Pule examines the complex experience of leaving one’s homeland and arriving in another – a reflection on his own migration from Niue to Aotearoa New Zealand. Using the grid-like composition of hiapo, he has developed a symbolic language of spears, migratory birds, sea creatures and geometric patterning that speaks to personal and shared histories of cross-cultural exchange. Here, he also reproduces an eighteenth-century drawing by Raiatean navigator Tupaia, depicting Captain Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks trading with a rakatira from Uawa. It’s an image that complicates our understanding of the dynamics involved in this encounter, and asks us to consider our own place in Aotearoa.

hiapo ~ barkcloth from Niue

rakatira ~ person of high rank, chief, leader

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)

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)

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)

“I came from the South Island, and the South Island I must mention! Yes your mountains still pile up in my thoughts! Your shorelines still run round the edges of the same. Big canoe of Maui, my little paddle will always be at your side.” —Tony Fomison, 1979 Te Waipounamu South Island always loomed large in Tony Fomison’s psyche, even after he made the shift north to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland from his hometown of Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1973. Drawn from memory and past experiences, the Waitaha Canterbury landscape continued as the subject of many of his paintings, including ‘Night Time, Amuri Bluff’. Fomison had developed a strong sense of the history of the land through his work as an assistant archaeologist for Canterbury Museum, where he researched early Māori settlements and whaling stations near Kaikōura and Horomaka Banks Peninsula – including the Māori settlement site Haumuri, also known as Amuri Bluff, on the Kaikōura coastline.

(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)