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Kyla Mackenzie is an Auckland based freelance curator and art writer who has recently completed her PhD on the works of John Weeks. Weeks (1886-1965) occupies a shadowy place in New Zealand art history: a ferocious fire at Auckland’s Elam School of Art in 1949 destroyed many of his treasured canvases and drawings, and, with them, evidence of his development as an artist. However, Kyla Mackenzie’s research is enabling a clearer picture of Weeks’s eclectic oeuvre to emerge. 

One of his recurring themes was industry, an unusual subject in New Zealand art. While his energetic, abstracted paintings Industry (1936) and Homage to Leger (c. 1950) are among the better known, Weeks, as this talk illustrates, had painted industrial themes as early as 1920 in an approach inflected by Impressionism and Tonalism.

The monumental Sun-bathed Clay Pit (c1922), a representation of Canterbury industry and altered landscape, is the most important surviving painting from the artist's less well known early career. Although he was highly regarded as an Auckland modern painter and teacher after 1930, he had previously been associated with the artists of Canterbury. He later studied in Edinburgh and Paris but on his return to New Zealand after serving as a medical officer in World War I he studied and taught at Canterbury College with Archibald Nicoll.

Drawing on her recent research, Kyla Mackenzie will consider both the depiction of specific industrial scenes and the overall position of John Weeks in the story of Canterbury art.