Art New Zealand

You have to have stories or some kind of whakapapa relationship to make it [i.e. Māori art] work effectively and properly. Cliff WhitingHe hawhi Māori, he hawhi Pākehā kei au [ka katakata ia], engari he Māori katoa ōku mahi. Cliff Whiting, TVNZ Waka

With an engineer father and an armament-manufacturing uncle, Michael Nicholson might well have been earmarked for a life spent down at the pragmatic end of human affairs. But then again he was a Nicholson, nephew of the painter William and a younger

Over the years, I have found that one of the good things about looking at art, especially with reviewing exhibitions, is being forced to contend with stuff I would normally edit out of my life, not even let anywhere near me. Art encompasses many tast

Several years ago, while walking on a very special bush track tucked away down the back of my uncle’s home in New Plymouth, a new bloom caught my attention. Through the shadow of dense and dripping trees came a glimpse of synthetic colour, a sparkle

The idea of the house as a home is at the very centre of Marie Shannon’s retrospective Rooms found only in the home, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery: all paths lead to ‘home’ as to a treasure chest waiting to be unpacked. The photographic and video

When I was at art school in France I had a friend whose parents were responsible for a very small provincial museum―the Musée du Parchemin et de l’Enluminure in the Rouillon-Sarthe region. I remember going there with a group of friends and we were al

Not nostalgia: this is the title of a recent exhibition by Joanna Margaret Paul at Bowerbank Ninow in Auckland. It comes from Paul’s essay, ‘A passionate pilgrimage in time’, in which she reflected on memory, history and architectural heritage. Rejec

All Lines Converge takes its title from a 1973 poem by Joanna Margaret Paul, which refers to all lines meeting at a centre outside the frame. Curated by Sophie O’Brien and Chloe Cull, this extensive show is primarily about that: connections and cross

The ‘intimate passport’ is not used, rather it is constantly (renewed) by whomever remembers (to be touched by) it. I know far less about the arts and technologies of Māori sewing than I do about weaving, of which I am very much a beginner learner a

Christchurch-based photographer Maurice Lye is wide-ranging and systematic in his considerations of natural and manufactured structures throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. Whether in colour or black-and-white, his modus operandi is understated, quietly

In 2016–17 a series of exhibitions in Britain examining that country’s early twentieth-century art included retrospectives of Paul Nash and Vanessa Bell and a survey of Sussex’s contribution to modernism. There was also The Mythic Method: Classicism

‘None of the greatest painters were eccentric in their work’, the (great) English landscape painter John Constable once proclaimed. ‘They were too consistent with themselves to merit such an epithet; too sensible of what they were about.’ Helen Brown

Across the table sits a blue-eyed angel, muse and goddess, drinking Earl Grey tea. Tomorrow she is 86 years old, but surrounding her are images and incarnations of her immortality. These include two that I encountered in 1996 amongst the stacked chai

Undreamed Of . . . 50 Years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship by Priscilla Pitts and Andrea Hotere Otago University Press, Dunedin 2017 In some ways Undreamed Of was one of the easiest books on art to write. The thorny curation questions―who do w