Recently I’ve been working on paintings that make an exchange between historical events of the colonial period, constructed incidents and my own personal memory and imagination of the places I spent my youth in the Manawatu and Rangatikei and latterly in Waikato and Thames Valley. These paintings have developed from several exhibition projects based on my trips in India and China that reflected on the dislocation and fantasy of travel.
I’ll show images of works from these projects and some source material from my current work on Haere Mai to the Highway. I’ll talk a bit about my artistic influences and methods too, if that seems relevant to the audience.
I draw on traditions of ‘history painting’ as a genre or mode of representation that was frequently used by European artists to ‘capture’ the colonies. In history painting, narratives were often ‘invented’ in such works to portray the life and culture of indigenous and immigrant residents. Such works were used to ‘document’ the pristine and developing colony and to promote migration.
Regionalism in art is also of interest to me, not so much for its origins in the American mid-west but for its common subjects; ordinary people, work atmosphere and everyday life, often in rural and agricultural scenes. I don’t want to replicate these romantic sentiments, but to use them as a counterpoint to more contemporary visions and concerns.
The project will implicate long established and contested traditions in landscape Painting in New Zealand and their implication in constructs of personal and national identity, cultural change and loss.