Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
Taiopeka
Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Field Drawing with Madison Kelly
Madison Kelly/Blue Oyster Art Project Space
Workshop
Education Centre
$25 / Bookings essential
A walking and drawing workshop focused on close observation and creating personal records of nature.
Join Ōtepoti-based artist Madison Kelly (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Pākehā) on a hīkoi through selected sites around Ōtākaro Avon river. Combining techniques from life drawing, scientific illustration and ecological surveying, this workshop aims to introduce new tools for seeing and representing te taiao.
Related reading: Workshop, Kai Tahu, artist-led
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
‘For us and our children after us’
“… the relative poverty in which many Canterbury Kāi Tahu were then living was directly attributable to their loss of land in the nineteenth century.”
In 1952, the historian and friend of Kāi Tahu Harry Evison (1924–2014) completed his Master’s thesis, ‘A history of the Canterbury Maoris (Ngaitahu) with special reference to the land question’. He concluded that the relative poverty in which many Canterbury Kāi Tahu were then living was directly attributable to their loss of land in the nineteenth century. His argument reflected the intergenerational, lived experience of Kāi Tahu communities but was dismissed in the academic circles of the 1950s where the inherently racist Pitt-Rivers theory of ‘culture clash’ prevailed – according to this theory the negative impact of the colonial encounter on Māori was attributed to ‘psychological collapse’ rather than the economic hardship enforced by the loss of land and resources.
