art and photography

The Person is Fashioned and the Poem is Shaped until Poem and Person are One

April 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Piet Nieuwland

Albatross Neck: Landings by the Ancient Mariner and Romanticism in Aotearoa New Zealand 1770–2022 by Nigel Brown and Denys Trussell (Arcology Publishing, 2022), 247pp, $90; The Wanderer: Book Two by Ron Riddell (Casa Nueva Publishers, 2022), 117pp, $20; Songs to the Unsung by Kayleen M. Hazlehurst (Blue Dragonfly Press, 2023), 141pp, $26.50

In high school, we studied the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge with the help of a teacher who had sailed around the world. It was an influential poem but the question that dogged me was, why are we reading this English poem from a bygone era? We were also introduced to a suite of Romantic poets and later to William Blake in The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. At the time, I was a huge fan of the Ecologist magazine, edited by Edward Goldsmith, which provided challenging and stimulating essays on the global environmental crisis that was becoming increasingly apparent. [Read more…]

Matrix of Shape-Shifting

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2022), 392pp, $65

‘The Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one, forged in journeys across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea’, the late Moana Jackson writes in his foreword to the book Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art. The book is based on the blockbuster exhibition of the same name presented by Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, between December 2020 and May 2021, which took over the entire Gallery building and also spilled out into areas in the downtown Britomart precinct. [Read more…]

‘Disobedience and Bravery’: The Power of Female Image-Making

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Mary Macpherson

Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film by Gaylene Preston (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 367pp, $40; droplet by Sheryl Campbell (self-published, 2022), 96pp, $80

Cinema and its close relative, the still image, are among the important ways we understand the world in the twenty-first century. Whether they’re staged fiction or taken from the world, images tell us stories about ourselves and society. But what shapes the narratives is the sensibility behind the lens and the intention of the storyteller. In these two books, Gaylene’s Take, a memoir by Dame Gaylene Preston, and droplet, a photobook by Sheryl Campbell, we see the power of work by female image-makers and feel the influence of feminism, which has helped rewrite society’s behaviour toward women since the nineteenth century and earlier. [Read more…]

A Principled Resistance

October 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

The Other Way by David Trubridge (David Trubridge Press, 2022), 317pp, 128 colour plates, $99

Renowned designer David Trubridge has always demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and the environment in his work, whether in furniture, lighting or other media. The Other Way, a book of travel essays and photographs, allows him to articulate his ideas on these subjects in new ways.

The ‘other way’ of the title refers to Trubridge’s favoured travel itinerary: if a place attracts ‘teeming crowds’, he will instinctively go the other way, to the land. ‘Humans once had a close and balanced relationship with all the natural world around them’, he writes. ‘This instinctive respect and empathy formed the basis of spirituality. I want to reclaim that spirituality and gently place it back where it belongs in the centre of our connection to the whole of “Life”.’ His desire to foreground nature—and his corresponding wariness of humanity, especially Westerners—characterises the book. It is deep ecology, a principled resistance to the instrumentalisation of the natural world. [Read more…]

Stone House & Straw Houses

September 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Ravenscar House: A Biography by Sally Blundell (Canterbury University Press, 2022), 224pp, $59.99; Road People of Aotearoa: House truck journeys 1978–1984 by Paul Gilbert (Rim Books, 2021), 184pp, $50

While these two books have a common theme of shelter, their inhabitants are poles apart. We are looking, I suppose, at high culture with millions of bucks behind it and a kind of DIY counterculture, where one manages to make a picturesque home with few bits from the tip, cadging some car cases (carcasses?) from an importer and bolting the whole caboodle on the back of an old truck to take to the dusty road. [Read more…]