Essays & Articles

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  ADAMS, Mark, 1949-

  9.4.1992 Piopiotahi - Milford Sound, Atawhenua - Fiordland 2006, no.7 (Photograph)

  On a Thursday before Easter in 1992, photographer Mark Adams put his large format camera up on a tripod in the wettest place in New Zealand. In three parts, he re-created the well-known panoramic view of Milford Sound looking northwest from Freshwater Basin. But something is missing from the resultant images. The centrepiece of this glacier-carved fiord (and its quintessential geological feature) is obscured by mist. Gone is the distinctive marker which elevates this landscape above the picturesque to iconic status as a World Heritage Site. The sublime Mitre Peak has become a haunting absence.

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  CASSAB, Judy, 1920-

  Portrait of VC Colin Maiden (Painting)

  Like royalty, judges, politicians, bishops and vice-chancellors of universities are all prime candidates for having their portraits painted from life. It is usually a time-consuming business.

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  CULBERT, Bill, 1935-

  Decanter, London (Photograph)

  The unlikely pairing of wine and filament light bulbs has long been a recurring motif in the highly sociable work of Bill Culbert, as has the fluorescent tube, all of which act as metaphor and evidence of the ways we think about light, energy and materials.

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  ELLIS, Robert, 1929-

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  City with Orange River ()

  Aerial mapping work carried out as part of National Service in Britain after World War Two later proved influential for Robert Ellis’s art.

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  et al.

  The Fundamenteel Rekenen (Sculpture)

  In contrast to the cult of personality that surrounds many artists, the artist collective et al. (a Latin abbreviation for “and others”) operates as an anonymous group, avoiding the effect an artist’s biographical details can have on the way their work is read. In fact, so effective is this insistence on anonymity, and so embedded is it in their work, that any attempt at biographical explanation quickly becomes a consideration of what they do rather than who they are.

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  FAHEY, Jacqueline, 1929-

  Barbara Speaks to Mum (Painting)

  With her husband the eminent psychiatrist Fraser McDonald, Jacqueline Fahey lived her married life in hospital houses until 1984.

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  FONG, Luise, 1964-

  Cluster (Painting)

  The recurring watery forms of Luise Fong’s paintings can be related back to an early childhood experience of almost drowning, a memory she associates with a blissful suspension in time and space.

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  GARCIA-ALVAREZ, Alberto, 1928-

  Collective Mind (Mural)

  The mural on the Western side of the Science Building on Princes Street may be Alberto Garcia Alvarez’s most visible work in New Zealand but, when he completed it in 1980, he was no stranger to working at such scale.

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  GOOD, Roy, 1945-

  An Episode of Events (Painting)

  Playing off a dominant circle shape against chevrons and triangles in a square ground, this work was an experiment by the artist in combining ideas about geometric pattern painting into “one grand pictorial assembly”.

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  HAMMOND, Bill, 1947-

  Twirl (Painting)

  The mid-1990s were an important period for Lyttelton-based painter William (Bill) Hammond, whose established practice was undergoing a distinct evolution that resulted in the iconic bird paintings he is now famous for.

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  HARTIGAN, Paul, 1953-

  Colony (Sculpture)

  Challenged by Art Collection curator Michael Dunn to make his best work for the Engineering atrium in 2002, Elam-graduate Paul Hartigan surpassed his earlier, multicoloured forays into neon. Named the best public sculpture in Auckland in 2006, Colony has its origin in the artist’s memory of drifting in a long boat beneath the vaulted ceiling of glowworm lights on a childhood visit to Waitomo Caves. Despite the quotidian nature of the commission, Paul's sculpture still impresses with its energy and impact, the hectic squiggles of persimmon-coloured light miraculously produced by bent glass tubes mired in cement.

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  HIPKINS, Gavin, 1968-

  The Sanctuary (Bird) (Photograph)

  By the time Gavin Hipkins staged his exhibition The Colony at The Gus Fisher Gallery in 2002, he had become well-known for his distinctive technique of printing entire rolls of film uncut in continuous strips, known as falls, hung together to provide a dense grid of images.

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  HOPE, Gabrielle, 1916-1962

  Mount Tauhara after Fire (Watercolour)

  Described as “a woman of mettlesome and sparkling personality, with passionate intellectual and philosophical interests”, Gabrielle Hope had a career as a painter that lasted just two short decades.

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  HUGHES, Sara, 1971-

  Chromatic Interaction (Painting)

  Textiles are often referred to in Elam MFA graduate Sara Hughes’ work, and Chromatic Interaction looks at first to be laid out like a pattern for busy fingers to follow in making a hexagon quilt.

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  JENKINSON, Megan, 1958-

  Prudentia endeavours to construct a Model of Plato's Ideal State with the Building Blocks of Tombs of the Dead Kings (Photograph)

  Cutting out photographed sets of printer’s type with embroidery scissors to form the names of New Zealand’s biggest corporations in 1986, Megan Jenkinson presciently depicted the flimsy basis for the sharemarket speculation which would lead to the crash of October 1987. As Brett Wilkinson, a young executive with Rainbow Corporation, would later explain, “The listed companies [were] geared up and reported valuations largely based on dubious valuations. It was one giant pyramid game.”

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  KARAKA, Emily, 1952-

  Waste Land (Maori)

  In 1986, Merimeri Penfold, Senior Lecturer in Māori, had just published the groundbreaking Penguin book Women and the Arts in New Zealand with Elizabeth Eastmond in the Art History department. Reproducing works by forty women, of whom six were Māori, this influential book took an unashamedly feminist approach, redressing the absence of women (and Māori) artists from previous histories of New Zealand art. The authors’ statement on the imprint page stated the political intent of the project explicitly: “We should also like to acknowledge the crucial importance of the women’s movement for the basic conception of this book and for many of the perspectives adopted.”

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  KILLEEN, Richard, 1946-

  Man, Window and Awning (Painting)

  Teaching him at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Colin McCahon noticed that Richard Killeen’s compositions seemed assembled from separate parts, like jigsaw puzzle pieces. This one even takes its title from the three significant features in it, and orders them in a descending hierarchy of importance. Richard’s subject matter is both realistic and abstract, and his work allows a reading of both modes. Yet if painting in the Realist tradition was once considered a window onto the world, Richard is showing in this work that the opening is now closed. His stylised figure has become a flattened shape pasted over the background, casting little shadow. Is the Realist mode just the alibi for the investigation of figure and field with image and pattern, or does narrative linger on?

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  LEE, Jae Hoon, 1973-

  Trekking (Photograph)

  Every year, thousands of tourists flock in summer to Nepal, a landlocked country in Southern India between China and India.

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  LEE, Jae Hoon, 1973-

  Salvation #3 (Photograph)

  Along with a substantial number of fellow art students such as Seung Yul Oh and Hye Rim Lee, Jae Hoon Lee (no relation) arrived in New Zealand to study at Elam School of Fine Arts as part of a new generation of South Koreans migrating to New Zealand in the late 1990s.

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  LETHBRIDGE, John, 1948-

  Black double ended series 280/36 (Drawing)

  Helensville-born folk singer - and erstwhile editor of Craccum - Peter Cape was as famous for his beautifully produced art books as he was for the classic kiwiana songs “Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line” and “All Black Jerseys”. In the last decade of his short life he published four surveys of New Zealand painting and crafts based on interviews done with artists as part of his job as arts and religion editor at Radio New Zealand. Prints and Printmakers in New Zealand was published in 1974, during the heyday of printmaking in New Zealand.

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  MONTEITH, Alex, 1977-

  1020 metres in 26 minutes: Waitangi Day Auckland Harbour Bridge Protest (Video)

  Unlike with many of Alex Monteith’s other video projects, the critically slow pace of the event that forms the subject of her video work, 1020 metres in 26 minutes Waitangi Day Auckland Harbour Bridge Protest, grounds the viewer in familiar territory, allowing the location and the subject of the video to be immediately unravelled. Simultaneously however, the viewer is also drawn into the curious and somewhat dizzying landscape that is formed where the adjacent screens meet. Passages of the Harbour Bridge, segments of land, sky, clouds, sea and automobiles roll across two disparate yet intimately connected fields of vision.

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  MORTIMER, Roger, 1958-

  Manaia (Painting)

  Google noted New Zealand artist Roger Mortimer’s name and you will disappear down a rabbit hole into a tale of medieval manoeuvering. His 14th century ancestor, Roger de Mortimer, was an English nobleman who was strategically married off at 14 to the equally youthful Joan de Geneville. She later had the good fortune to inherit property in the Welsh Marches and Ireland as well as the 11th century Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. With this wealth behind him, Baron Roger started the Despenser War, leading Marcher lords in a revolt against King Edward II. Unfortunately for him, the attempt to overthrow King Edward failed, and Baron Roger found himself chained up in the Tower of London. Helped by his mistress Isabella, King Edward’s queen consort, he managed to escape to France where he rallied troops to invade England and depose Edward, having him murdered at Berkeley Castle. Three years later in 1330, Edward’s eldest son got his revenge, and Roger de Mortimer was taken to Tyburn where he was hung without trial at the age of 43.

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  MRKUSICH, Milan, 1925-

  Painting Ochre (Painting)

  In June 1949, the School of Architecture hosted Milan Mrkusich’s first-ever public showing of paintings and drawings. Sixty years later The University of Auckland is again the venue for a new milestone in Mrkusich’s career. The exhibition Trans-Form: the abstract art of Milan Mrkusich has been curated for the Gus Fisher Gallery by Ed Hanfling and Alan Wright, research associates of the Art History Department, to mark the publication of their Auckland University Press book, Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation.

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  MUNRO, Sarah, 1970-

  Socket (Sculpture)

  Sarah Munro completed her Doctorate in Fine Arts at The University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 2005 and was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago the following year. As a multi-media artist, she oscillates in her work between two and three dimensions and encompasses several art disciplines including painting, sculpture, photography and digital technology. Bought for the University of Auckland’s Art Collection in 2003, Socket successfully embraces many of these diverse facets of Munro’s art practice. The subject is a painted portrait of the artist’s half-brother, yet the materials and techniques employed by Munro leave Socket as an art object that lies far from the traditional notion of what constitutes a portrait. The shaped support of the work is constructed from finely shaped blocks of polyester foam overlaid with fibreglass that Munro applies by hand. The surface is then painstakingly ground back, puttied and sanded until it reaches a smooth, lustrous perfection. The painted representation of the subject’s face is applied to the shaped ground in a similarly technical but time-consuming manner with the assistance of a digital painting machine.

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  O'BRIEN, Gregory, 1961-

  And this also is the Point of Saying Goodbye (Drawing)

  part of a BA at The University of Auckland, and published his first illustrations (done to accompany "Paris", a poem by C.K. Stead and published by Auckland University Press) in 1984. After graduation that year, he published his own poems in literary journals in Australia, including Meanjin and Scripsi, as well as in Island, Sport and Landfall in New Zealand. These poems were brought together with drawings in a single book, Location of the Least Person, which was published by Auckland University Press in 1987, and led to him winning the Frank Sargeson Fellowship the next year. This award brought with it residency in the flat above the George Fraser Gallery, and occasioned his first meeting with the Hungarian photographer Mari Mahr, who exhibited there in 1988.

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  OH, Seung, 1981-

  Oioio (Sculpture)

  Seung Yul Oh graduated Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2005, one of a new generation of migrants drawn to study in New Zealand from South Korea, also including Jeena Shin, Hye Rim Lee and Jae Hoon Lee (no relation). Oh moved to New Zealand in 1997 and, at time of writing, has just opened his first solo exhibition in his home town of Seoul, where he is currently undertaking a residency in an artist-run space founded and managed by well-known artist Choi Jeong Hwa, who shares Oh’s playful sensibility.

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  PARKER, John, 1944-

  # 80, a pot (Applied Arts)

  When potter John Parker began making a name for himself in the 1970s, the clean, manufactured look of mass-produced Crown Lynn ceramics was losing its fashionable status and was certainly not to be taken seriously by potters.

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  PARKER, John, 1944-

  # 85, a pot (Applied Arts)

  When potter John Parker began making a name for himself in the 1970s, the clean, manufactured look of mass-produced Crown Lynn ceramics was losing its fashionable status and was certainly not to be taken seriously by potters.

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  PARKER, John, 1944-

  # 96, a pot (Applied Arts)

  When potter John Parker began making a name for himself in the 1970s, the clean, manufactured look of mass-produced Crown Lynn ceramics was losing its fashionable status and was certainly not to be taken seriously by potters.

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  RAE, Jude, 1956-

  Beirut, July 2006 (#246) (Painting)

  Compelled to begin this contemporary history painting when war broke out in the Middle East in July 2006, Jude Rae also used this painting’s scale as an opportunity to explore a new, more liquid, painting technique. Israel was retaliating against a Hezbollah missile attack on border settlements by launching air strikes and artillery attacks on Lebanon, extensively damaging infrastructure and killing over a thousand civilians, and wounding many more. Jude Rae had arrived in France to take up the Moya Dyring Memorial Fellowship at the Cité Internationale des Artes directly from Dunedin where she had been painting large architectural interiors as the artist-in-residence there. She was planning to make similar studies in Paris, but coverage of the July war in the French media was extensive, and, absorbed by the imagery, she began to make drawings and watercolours of the conflict from the internet coverage.

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  REIHANA, Lisa, 1964-

  Captain James Cook - Female (In Pursuit of Venus) (Photograph)

  Artist and 2017 Distinguished Alumna Lisa Reihana is currently representing New Zealand at the 57th Venice Biennale in Italy with a panoramic video installation entitled Emissaries. It is her most ambitious project in a long, illustrious and innovative career with digital media. Ten years in the making, Emissaries is a remarkably complex digital animation that has undergone a number of modifications for the Biennale since it was last shown in Auckland, including incorporating Aboriginal figures.

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  ROSS, James, 1948-

  Figure (Listening) (Drawing)

  Existing in the middle ground between abstraction and figuration, James Ross’s pastel drawings play host to a range of organic forms.

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  SCOTT, Ian, 1945-

  New Zealand Evening (Central Otago) (Painting)

  At first blush, this painting from Ian Scott’s Authentic Traditions appears to be textbook postmodernism. Combine “low” art (beer advertising) with “high” art (a photograph of Colin McCahon, twentieth century New Zealand art’s biggest gun) with a conventional painting of iconic South Island scenery and a cluster of punga trees for ironic effect.

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  SZIRMAY, Marte, 1946-

  Untitled (Sculpture)

  Fearing Russian repression after the Hungarian revolt, Marté Szirmay’s parents emigrated, arriving in New Zealand in 1957. Her stepfather, Frank Szirmay, was a figurative sculptor in the academic tradition, but her own interests were in abstraction. Study at Elam School of Fine Arts in the 1960s brought an appreciation of the Russian constructivist brothers, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, and their engineering aesthetic but not their literalism. In her own work she sought to naturalise manufactured materials including steel and resin, deploying them to describe shapes derived from nature such as the koru as well as to make purely abstract geometrical forms.

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  TODD, Yvonne, 1973-

  Valley Candle (Photograph)

  With a background as a commercial photographer and shop assistant in a wig salon, Yvonne Todd is well versed in artifice and masquerade. She completed her BFA at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2001, the year before she won New Zealand’s art world’s highest art accolade, the Walters Prize, awarded to her by Venice Biennale curator Harald Szeeman. Her Sea of Tranquility series from that year posed beauty consultants collected up from Auckland department stores against black backgrounds like so many Stepford Wives. She has continued to foreground the performance of femininity ever since, although her practice is centred more generally on the business of image-making itself.

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  TODD, Yvonne, 1973-

  Envy Log (Photograph)

  DISTURBING AND ALLURING "Envy Log" is example of the way Yvonne Todd's photography can draw you in with the promise of a scandalous story but leave you with nothing more than unresolved plot twists. Here she presents us with a young girl sitting slumped and resigned in a wheelchair, looking towards us with an inquisitive, rather sullen gaze. Behind her stands a woman whose eyes we cannot meet, her face veiled in dark shadow.

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  WALTERS, Gordon, 1919-1995

  Untitled (Painting)

  The emergence in the 1950s of Gordon Walters as one of our most important pioneers of abstract art, along with the likes of Don Peebles and Milan Mrkusich, signalled an important cultural transition in New Zealand. As critic Francis Pound has argued, it was a shift away from the literary influences of the nationalist landscape painters towards the flat planes of architecture and design, from the rustic countryside to urban modernism.

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  WHITE, Robin, 1946-

  Sam Hunt, Bottle Creek (Painting)

  Artist Robin White and poet Sam Hunt met in 1968 when they were both 22 years old. He was visiting Auckland to perform at the University Arts Festival and she had finished her Diploma of Fine Arts at Elam and was training to be a teacher. When Robin was offered a job at Mana College in Porirua in 1969, Sam found her a cottage to live in next to his at Bottle Creek on Paremata Harbour north of Wellington.

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  WOOLLASTON, Toss, 1910-1998

  Taranaki Landscape (Painting)

  Out on his bicycle selling Rawleighs products door-to-door in Greymouth in the sixties, Toss Woollaston could only dream of becoming a fulltime painter.

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  ZUSTERS, Jane, 1951-

  Untitled (triptych), 2. Two Selves (Painting)

  Living and working in Italy for six months in 1984 immersed Jane Zusters in the NeoExpressionist works of the Italian artists of the Transavant-guardia as well as the triptych format of the Renaissance altar painting. In particular she admired the success that Mimmo Paladino had in establishing the connections between disparate elements in the same painting.

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