Ralph Hotere
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1931, d.2013
Te Aupōuri,
Muriwhenua,
Māori
Dawn/Water Poem
- 1986
- Acrylic on canvas
- Purchased with assistance from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, 1986
- Reproduced by permission of the Hotere Foundation Trust
- 2430 x 1825mm
- 86/50
Tags: abstraction, anger, crosses (motifs), numbers, poetry, political art, red (color), words
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“There are very few things I can say about my work, that are better than saying nothing.”
—Ralph Hotere, undated
Exhibition History
Dawn/Water Poem brings together the work of two of New Zealand’s pre-eminent artists - painter Ralph Hotere and poet Bill Manhire. It was made at a time of strong protest against the French nuclear testing programme carried out on the Pacific atoll of Mururoa during the 1980s. Hotere has taken Manhire’s poem of the same name and transformed it into a visual experience. The collaboration has produced a pointedly beautiful political statement. In nautical terms, an ‘x’ means ‘keep away’. To Manhire’s repeated word ‘sunrise’ Hotere has added ‘Mururoa’, using a vivid red to suggest apocalypse, anger and sacrifice. Hotere was born in the far north of New Zealand. He first studied art in Dunedin but in 1961 won a scholarship to study at the Central School of Art in London. He has subsequently won many awards. Since the 1970s he has lived at Port Chalmers, Dunedin. Political and social issues feature strongly in Hotere’s work. (Opening Gallery hang, May 2003)
Related reading: Poetry, Enviromentalism
Notes
Art and politics
As New Zealand prepares to go to the polls on the eve of what has surely been the most colourful election campaign season in the nation's history, we present a selection of works from Christchurch Art Gallery's collection on the theme of politics.
Notes
Just because...
Obviously, there doesn't really need to be a reason for putting up an image as dazzling as this, but: today is National Poetry Day.
Commentary
Pauline Rhodes: Blue Mind
Painted blue and patterned with rust, the thin plywood panels and screens lean nonchalantly around the walls of the gallery and form a skyline of sorts. Across the floor sculptures intersect the space, with groupings of tall rods, waist-high enclosures, clusters of plywood shapes and a small kayak frame on salvaged seaweed and driftwood. Islands for the audience to navigate. The forms are roughly human in scale and relative to the body, generating an intensity and making this an immersive installation to wade through.
Commentary
The Edge of the Sea
A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:
Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.
Interview
Power Play
In November 2017, Simon Denny’s The Founder’s Paradox opened at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, the first solo exhibition Denny had made specifically for New Zealand audiences in several years. His starting point for the project was local: the news, broken by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert in early 2017, that the billionaire tech investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel was in fact a New Zealand citizen.
Commentary
Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders
“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
