Brenda Nightingale

b.1961

Untitled

2013
Watercolour
Purchased 2013
570 x 760mm
2013/064
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Location: Arcade

Tags: blue (color), hills, natural landscapes, shores (landforms), surveying instruments, white (color)

Brenda Nightingale’s view from Awaroa Godley Head looks across the entrance to Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour to Te Piaka Adderley Head and the coastal headlands of Koukourarata Port Levy, Pigeon Bay and Menzies Bay beyond. Inspired by the landscapes of Whakaraupō where she lives and works, Nightingale has been influenced by earlier women watercolour artists working in Waitaha Canterbury, such as Olivia Spencer Bower and Margaret Stoddart. Her view from Awaroa is disrupted by the trig beacon that marks the geodetic survey pin hammered into the ground at this point. Trig beacons such as this are scattered throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and serve as stark reminders that surveying the land was a key tool of the colonisation process, serving to bring about legal titles to the land and in effect commercialising it for settler gains.

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

Exhibition History

other labels about this work

Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016

In 2012, a suite of Christchurch artist Brenda Nightingale’s delicate, brooding ‘Christchurch Hills’ watercolours were reproduced in a limited edition publication, which was given away for free as part of Christchurch Art Gallery’s post-quake Outer Spaces programme. Focusing on the Port Hills that dominate the city’s southern skyline, Nightingale’s paintings subvert the picturesque conventions of the watercolour tradition; privileging, instead of idealised vistas, the often-ordinary objects that complicate our readings of them – lamp-posts, rubbish bins and walking track signs. Here, the trigonometric station at Godley Head offers an unexpected interruption to the view out across the Banks Peninsula headlands.