Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

To Re-remember and Re-learn

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Rachel Smith

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, 2021), 256 pp, $35; Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate by David Young (Otago University Press, 2021), 288pp, $60

Two very different books, one memoir and one non-fiction, The Forgotten Coast and Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate offer an invitation to look closely at the world we live in—to listen and learn, to understand and re-remember. 

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw is a new addition to Massey University Press’ short memoir series. Shaw is Professor of Politics at Massey University, and his memoir looks to fill in the gaps of his own forgotten story. In part, it is an attempt to personally respond to Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget, in which she asks:

What stories do your dead tell you? How do you see your past? [Read more…]

Art and the Environment in Photobooks

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Mary Macpherson

The Near Future by Hannah Watkinson (self-published), 158 pp, softcover $45/hardcover $80; Conversātiō – in the company of bees by Anne Noble with Zara Stanhope and Anna Brown (Massey University Press, 2021), 272 pp, $60

At the end of her book The Near Future, photographer and writer Hannah Watkinson asks: ‘How do you love the land, as well as what’s buried beneath it?’ and then, ‘How do you make a living, if ignoring what is to come?’ These two questions underpin The Near Future as Watkinson takes us on a socioeconomic journey, using text and photographs, through the extractive industries of the West Coast, juxtaposed with the threat of climate change. [Read more…]

Paradoxes, Mysteries and Obsessions

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241.

David Eggleton

Ralph Hotere: The dark is light enough by Vincent O’Sullivan (Penguin, 2020), 368pp, $45

The artistic achievement of Ralph Hotere (Te Aupōuri) towers like a great lighthouse above the pure harbour. It’s as if he illuminates, with a delicate precision and a sweeping blade of light, New Zealand’s brooding darkness, spiritual as well as topographical. Born near Mitimiti, Northland, in 1931 and baptised into the Roman Catholic church as Hone Papita Raukua Hotere, he was an art prodigy almost from the beginning and drew at every opportunity—even with a stick in the sand on the beach near his childhood home, content to watch the waves wash away his efforts. His most remarkable and significant period of artistic production, though, lasted for around forty years between about 1962 and 2002. He died in Dunedin in 2013. His was a busy, restless, crowded existence, as Vincent O’Sullivan tells it in his fascinating ‘biographical portrait’, which succeeds in synthesising a colourful, gossipy, anecdotal narrative out of the many paradoxes, mysteries and obsessions of this energetic and prolific New Zealand artist’s life. [Read more…]

Dick’s Pics

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Andrew Paul Wood

Me, According to the History of Art by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press, 2021), 312pp, $65

It goes without saying that Dick Frizzell is a very clever man with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Somehow, he has also survived half a century or so’s worth of New Zealand art-world vicissitudes, so inevitably his thoughts about art are going to be interesting. He is also (and this is not intended as an insult) a narcissist. You would have to have the balls to write your own history of world art, playing at being Kenneth Clark. You also must be a bit of a celebrity for a publisher to let you do it. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Behold: Me, According to the History of Art. Frizzell does to art history what Tom Scott did to Charles Upham. [Read more…]

He Whakarite Ataahua/A Beautiful Arrangement

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Gina Cole

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand: An anthology edited by Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris and James Norcliffe with art editor David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2020) 250pp, $39.95

In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre of 15 March 2019 and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that ‘We are all New Zealanders’, the editors of this anthology called for creative work that responded to life in contemporary New Zealand. The response wonderfully displayed in this collection was wide ranging and diverse. And after all, portraying range and diversity is the job of anthologies. In an article from a 2020 issue of the New Yorker, writer Clare Bucknell states:

Etymologically, ‘anthology’ refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force.1 [Read more…]

The Politics of (In)Visibilities

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Robyn Maree Pickens

Sapphic Fragments: Imogen Taylor with essays by Milly Mitchell-Anyon and Joanne Drayton (Hocken Collections, 2020), 50pp, $35; Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton (Canterbury University Press, 2020), 200pp, $65

Sapphic Fragments is an intimate, provocative and critical publication that is in conversation with artist Imogen Taylor’s exhibition at the Hocken Collections gallery in Ōtepoti Dunedin in early 2020, and her eleven-month residency as the 2019 Frances Hodgkins Fellow. The Fellow’s publication is ever increasingly becoming an integral component of the residency ‘outcomes’, and Taylor’s is no exception. Slightly smaller than A4, with a soft card cover and a geometric-patterned, light gsm dust jacket, Sapphic Fragments, as an aesthetic object, sits partway between high-end artist’s workbook and Moleskine stationery. The considered intimacy of the book’s exterior is continued between the pages with the inclusion of iPhone photos taken either by Taylor or partner and architect Sue Hillery. This naming of Sue Hillery as Taylor’s partner is significant for several reasons that encompass Taylor, Hillery and contemporary lesbian/queer visibility while also reaching back into the past of Hodgkins (1869–1947) and her ‘friend’ (lover), Dorothy K. Richmond. Sapphic Fragments can be interpreted as an act of reframing, repositioning and reclaiming elided intimate histories (personal and artistic), while agentially self-positioning Taylor (and Hillery) in an attempt to prevent present or future homophobic omissions. From design to photographs and text, the publication materialises the politics of queer intimacy, collaboration and reclamation. [Read more…]