Name: Coffee + Art: November
Location: The Thirsty Peacock

Coffee + Art: November

Emily Karaka DNA 2022. Acrylic, oil and oil pastel on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2022

Friends

Past event

The Thirsty Peacock

Purchase your own drink / Talk: free

Join the Friends for coffee and great conversation at The Thirsty Peacock, then enjoy a 30-minute Art Bite at 12pm. Bookings are not required.

This month, join curator Felicity Milburn as she discusses Emily Karaka's DNA in Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection on the first floor.

Related reading: Friends

Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection

Making room for fresh voices, untold narratives and disruptive ideas.

Emily Karaka is known for her fearless engagement with political issues, especially in relation to Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi). This painting depicts wāhine Māori activists who have led protest movements in Aotearoa – Te Puea Hērangi, Tuaiwa (Eva) Rickard, Titewhai Harawira and Whina Cooper – and includes the flag of Te Arikinui, Dame Te Atairangikaahu – the Māori Queen. At the centre is a self-portrait based on a photograph of the artist at Ihumātao, a site in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland with deep archaeological and cultural significance for Māori, which was confiscated by the New Zealand government in 1863 in a breach of the Treaty. “I am wearing the kahu kiwi of my tupuna, Kiwi Tamaki, and his whale bone taonga named Waiohua,” Emily has written. “The golden yellow ruru, encompassing and connecting the wāhine like a spiritual korowai, represents kaitiakitanga [guardianship/protection]. All the wāhine in the painting share the same DNA—whakapapa and ancestry.”

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Commentary

Mediating Reality

In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.

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Commentary

Do You See?

With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.

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Collection

Julia Morison Dulia

In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”

The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.

Interview

The London Club

In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…

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