Post 2 - Wellington visit and consideration of Landscape tradition in Aotearoa

Reflecting on the seminar and the exhibitions I have seen in the last 3 weeks

Wellington - visit to Te Papa to see the exhibition

Hiahia Whenua

Landscape and desire

This exhibition explores the different ways that artists in Aotearoa have expressed their relationship to the land - to the places we live in.

For Māori whenua is a concept that connects land to whakapapa (ancestral ties), providing a sense of belonging through time. The Western tradition of landscape painting offers an aesthetic response - a view of the land represented and reimagined by the artist.

The exhibition invites us to “Discover land as an accumulation, ‘a stretch of earth overlaid with memory, expectation, and thought’- land as connection and desire.”1

Fig 1 and 2 were interesting in terms of scale and view point for me.

fig 1

Emily Karaka (1952-)

Nga Tapuwae o Mataoho 2020

fig 2

Shane Cotton

photograph

1997

Hiahia - meaning to want or desire - depicts a mountain, both nearby and receding, photographed from the window of a moving car.

I am fomulating my ideas around how I perceive landscape and my sense of belonging, and how this is relevant to the new body of work I intend to finish for the end of year.

Landscape painting may be a theme of many of the paintings, as I try and negotiate my own relationship to this tradition.

footnotes

1 Author Scott Russell Saunders, 1998