B.

Heartland is a smaller version of the major retrospective exhibition mounted by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1992. The exhibition examines 25 years of Marilynn Webb's work as one of New Zealand's most prominent artists in the field of printmaking.

Heartland has been assembled chronologically and works are presented in sections according to the themes which appear in Webb's printmaking. Themes include anti-nuclear statements, the Aramoana Smelter Proposal and the Clutha Dam project. The land and the protection of the natural world are issues with which her work has become critically concerned, however her more spiritual land works are more important to her than works which make an obvious political reference.

Webb's work is widely known and has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. Since 1972 she has been asked to exhibit at every International Print Biennial and she has been the recipient of several grants from the QEII Arts Council. In 1974 she was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago. She has lived and worked in the Otago region for most of her professional life.

Marilynn Webb deserves recognition not only for her artistic achievements, but also for her contribution to the wider New Zealand community through her work in education. During the late nineteen fifties she trained as an art advisor in schools under the Gordon Tovey initiative which reintroduced Maori programmes to New Zealand school. Webb's own Maori ancestry has remained an important source of subject matter for printmaking which also draws on her Celtic ancestry.

('Heartland Prints and Pastels', Bulletin, No.84, April/May 1993, p.1)