B.

This painting by Bill Sutton expands our view of a familiar site on Christchurch’s Port Hills, encouraging the viewer to consider what mysteries may have been present before the arrival of Māori tangata whenua, the people of the land. Te Tihi o Kahukura, or the Citadel of Kahukura, is the first name of Castle Rock, the foregrounded point at the left of the painting. The extended Māori name translates as ‘the Citadel of the Rainbow God (and a) sky full of boiling clouds roaring around all over the place’. According to Kāi Tahu tradition, Kahukura is the atua, or god, who clothed the land; Kahukura later transformed to become the atua of rainbows. Here, Sutton’s interest in landscape, light and colour is applied to a location of significance for Māori. There is an intimacy in the site for Sutton, as he was able to see it “from my upstairs back-landing window”. Sutton’s house remains in what is now known as ‘the red zone’, an earthquake-battered place of an undetermined future.

(Te Tihi o Kahukura: The Citadel of Kahukura, 18 Februay 2017 - 18 May 2018)

William Sutton often travelled from his home in Christchurch to the Port Hills, where he made watercolours of amazing crispness and observational skill. In the ambitious series ‘Te Tihi o Kahukura and sky’, Sutton worked his watercolour sketches up into oil paintings of heroic scale and dramatic mood. Even by the standards of the series, this painting is unusual for its uncanny lighting and direct acknowledgement of Kahukura, the Māori spirit guardian who gives the rocky outcrop at the right its name. Rain clouds brew above the hills, as if preparing to reveal Kahukura in his physical form – a rainbow. (Brought to Light, November 2009)