This exhibition is now closed
Kā Honoka
18 December 2015 –
28 August 2016

Charles Meryon NOUVELLE- ZÉLANDE Greniers indigènes et habitations à AKAROA (Presqu’île de Banks) 1845 1860. Etching. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū 1972
Cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific shows whaling as central to the local story.
This selection of works explores early cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific and nineteenth-century European presence and ambition, with whaling as a central part of the local story. Spanning a period of some 180 years, this exhibition links such diverse locations as Paris, Sydney, Niue, Tonga, the Bay of Islands and Banks Peninsula, and brings the past powerfully into the present.
Curator:
Ken Hall
Exhibition number: 987
Collection works in this exhibition (17)
Night time, Amuri Bluff

Tony Fomison
Cascade
Peter Robinson
Coiffures diverses des habitans de Tonga Tabou, lle des Amis

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle-Zélande

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle-Zélande

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle-Zélande - coffre en bois sculpté [Plate 59]

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle Zélande. Pirogue de la baie Tolaga. Pl. 60

Pierre Langlumé, François-Edmond Pâris, Jean-Antoine Laurent
Nouvelle Zélande. Pirogue de L'Anse de l'Astrolabe. (Baie Tasman.), Pirogue du Canal de l'Astrolabe. Pl. 35

François-Edmond Pâris, Pierre Langlumé, Jean-Antoine Laurent, Joseph Tastu
Sydney from the North Shore

Conrad Martens
Captain Ahab, peg-legged hunter of the white whale

Tony Fomison
Nouvelle-Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks. Etat de la petite colonie Française d’Akaroa. Vers 1845 - Voyage du Rhin.

Charles Meryon
Le Ministère de la Marine

Charles Meryon
On Another Man’s Land

John Pule
Portrait of a Life-cast, possibly of ‘Taha-tahala’ [possibly Takatahara], Aotearoa New Zealand
Fiona Pardington
Portrait of a life-cast of ‘Pouka-lem’, Aotearoa New Zealand
Fiona Pardington
Nouvelle Zélande, Greniers indigènes et Habitations à Akaroa (Presqu’île de Banks, 1845

Charles Meryon
Nouvelle Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks, 1845. Pointe dite des Charbonniers, à Akaroa, Pêche à la Seine

Charles Meryon
Related
Notes

Holiday reading
Herman Melville's Moby Dick, first published on 14 November 1851, is a whale of a book...
Notes

Happy Birthday Akaroa Museum
Big Congratulations to Akaroa Museum on their 50th anniversary which they are celebrating this weekend.
Artist Profile

Doris Lusk: An Inventive Eye
In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
Article

A Tale of Two Chiefs
If you have recently visited He Taonga Rangatira: Noble Treasures at the Gallery you will have been struck by Fiona Pardington's two large photographic portraits of lifelike busts of Ngāi tahu tipuna (ancestors).
Collection

Tony Fomison Night time, Amuri Bluff
Tony Fomison’s luminous, night time view of Haumuri Bluff on the Kaikōura coast is a weighted landscape little-related to scenic appreciation. It carries a sense of time and of Fomison’s connections to this locality and its past.
In 1959, while a twenty-year-old sculpture student at the University of Canterbury, Fomison began working with the Canterbury Museum as an assistant ethnologist and archaeologist. He worked on extensive archaeological explorations of Māori settlements and early whaling sites near Kaikōura and on Banks Peninsula, and surveyed rock art sites throughout Canterbury. Haumuri, a Māori settlement site, was also the setting for a short-lived whaling station from 1844.
Something of Fomison’s motivation in painting is conveyed in his comment: “Given that the practitioner has a knowledge of our history, it can also be an opportunity to project an uncontaminated view of the past into the future.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection
Peter Robinson Cascade
Peter Robinson’s Cascade becomes an increasingly curious artefact within this selection of largely historical works. At the same time it strangely embodies the collective idea of kā honoka: a multitude of connections, relationships and links.
Robinson is a Ngāi Tahu artist with an enduring interest in the adaptation and lineage of ideas. His sculpturally satisfying polystyrene mass with its tumbling chains and weights sparks multiple imaginative associations. These might be immediately evident in relation to local maritime and whaling stories, but can take many directions. The ideas in the work, like Robinson’s chosen medium, may expand and reshape to find their own purpose. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection

Louis Auguste de Sainson Coiffures diverses des habitans de Tonga Tabou, lle des Amis
Louis Auguste de Sainson was the official artist aboard Captain Dumont d’Urville’s Astrolabe. He spent three months in New Zealand in 1827 on a maritime mapping survey between Tasman Bay and the Bay of Islands, followed by a month in Tonga. A substantial publication on d’Urville’s 1826–29 voyages through Asia and the Pacific was published in Paris in 1833, profusely illustrated by lithographic prints after de Sainson’s drawings.
D’Urville and his crew had close contact with people they met, including the Totaranui chief Tehinui (or Tehi-Noui) and his travelling companion Kokiore (or Koki-Hore) depicted in print 2, who were sketched by de Sainson after coming aboard at Palliser Bay (near present-day Wellington). Tehinui and Kokiore at first both intended to reach Europe, but instead disembarked at Tolaga Bay, later finding their own way home. In summarising his portrait sketching process, de Sainson later recalled: “What I was doing caused a lot of laughter; every minute they tried to escape me.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection

Louis Auguste de Sainson Nouvelle-Zélande
Louis Auguste de Sainson was the official artist aboard Captain Dumont d’Urville’s Astrolabe. He spent three months in New Zealand in 1827 on a maritime mapping survey between Tasman Bay and the Bay of Islands, followed by a month in Tonga. A substantial publication on d’Urville’s 1826–29 voyages through Asia and the Pacific was published in Paris in 1833, profusely illustrated by lithographic prints after de Sainson’s drawings.
D’Urville and his crew had close contact with people they met, including the Totaranui chief Tehinui (or Tehi-Noui) and his travelling companion Kokiore (or Koki-Hore) depicted in print 2, who were sketched by de Sainson after coming aboard at Palliser Bay (near present-day Wellington). Tehinui and Kokiore at first both intended to reach Europe, but instead disembarked at Tolaga Bay, later finding their own way home. In summarising his portrait sketching process, de Sainson later recalled: “What I was doing caused a lot of laughter; every minute they tried to escape me.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection
![Nouvelle-Zélande - coffre en bois sculpté [Plate 59]](/media/cache/d2/0d/d20d3e71824f4f302a9ddce9f4f594ca.jpg)
Louis Auguste de Sainson Nouvelle-Zélande - coffre en bois sculpté [Plate 59]
Louis Auguste de Sainson was the official artist aboard Captain Dumont d’Urville’s Astrolabe. He spent three months in New Zealand in 1827 on a maritime mapping survey between Tasman Bay and the Bay of Islands, followed by a month in Tonga. A substantial publication on d’Urville’s 1826–29 voyages through Asia and the Pacific was published in Paris in 1833, profusely illustrated by lithographic prints after de Sainson’s drawings.
D’Urville and his crew had close contact with people they met, including the Totaranui chief Tehinui (or Tehi-Noui) and his travelling companion Kokiore (or Koki-Hore) depicted in print 2, who were sketched by de Sainson after coming aboard at Palliser Bay (near present-day Wellington). Tehinui and Kokiore at first both intended to reach Europe, but instead disembarked at Tolaga Bay, later finding their own way home. In summarising his portrait sketching process, de Sainson later recalled: “What I was doing caused a lot of laughter; every minute they tried to escape me.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection

François-Edmond Pâris, Pierre Langlumé, Jean-Antoine Laurent, Joseph Tastu Nouvelle Zélande. Pirogue de L'Anse de l'Astrolabe. (Baie Tasman.), Pirogue du Canal de l'Astrolabe. Pl. 35
Aged just twenty when he joined Dumont d’Urville’s 1826–29 Pacific survey, François-Edmond Pâris created a comprehensive visual record of ships and boats encountered. In 1827 he recorded vessels he saw at Ūawa Tolaga Bay and Paepae-o-Tū Bream Bay, and Te Tai-o-Aorere Tasman Bay and Tāmaki Strait, Auckland.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)