Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Put Yourself in My Place

Leave a Comment

Chris Tse

Summer Grass by Ginny Sullivan (Steele Roberts, 2017), 72 pp., $19.99; Edgeland and Other Poems by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $27.50; View from the South by Owen Marshall with photographs by Grahame Sydney (Vintage, 2018), 208 pp., $40

It feels somewhat reductive in 2019 to be framing a review of three New Zealand poetry books with the poets’ shared exploration of place and landscape, but here we are. However, that is not to say that these three books are themselves reductive in any sense. So much of our country’s art is rooted in the land – I can still hear my university lecturers exalting the pivotal role that our celebrated landscape has played in the development of our national literature and film history. And if it’s not our own land then it’s the far-flung places we Kiwis end up in, a shared wanderlust pushing us to escape the confines of our island nation, our isolation. [Read more…]

Engaging Photography

Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

Gavin Hipkins: The Domain (Victoria University Press, 2017), 240 pp., $70

The monograph Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, released in November 2017 to mark the opening of the Dowse Art Museum’s largest-ever survey exhibition of the same name, is a beautifully produced, super-illustrated tome. It begins with three ‘meaty’ essays, ends with a plethora of historic texts, and contains 147 pages of colour plates (over half the book) in between. Significantly, it provides an opportunity to more singularly study the richly proliferative, multi-threaded and motif-circling practice of a senior New Zealand artist working across still and moving image in both gallery and cinema contexts. However, the non-indexed, non-thematic (and non-chronological) ordering of its wedge of colour plates might hamper that study at times. [Read more…]

Macpherson’s Part in the City

Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017 by Mary Macpherson with an essay by Gregory O’Brien (Mary Macpherson and PhotoForum Inc., 2018), 44 pp, $35

Designated as PhotoForum 89. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, 29 May to 22 July 2018 as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography.

 

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange’s famous quote comes to mind as I open the pages of Mary Macpherson’s new photographic book, The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017.1 Modestly sized, it presents 25 superbly coloured photographs of the city, and an essay by Gregory O’Brien.  [Read more…]

In Counterpoint to the Music of Time 

Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Aberhart Starts Here by Lara Strongman with Laurence Aberhart (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2018), 136 pp., $39.99

This catalogue is based on the Christchurch Art Gallery show of Aberhart’s early work (1975 to 1983 with one picture from 1986), from when he was living in Lyttelton and later working as an instructor at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art at Ilam.

My initial thought was to wonder: have we got to a point when everything that can be written about Laurence Aberhart has been written? Can we squeeze one more review out of this gigantic stack of beautiful work that he has shored up against the crumbling ruins of our civilisation? [Read more…]

A Dynamic Optimism

Leave a Comment

Peter Shand

Gordon Walters: New vision edited by Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons and Julia Waite (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki & Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2017), 244 pp., $79

The title of Gordon Walters: New vision presents its own wero. Building from Walters’ innovating position within New Zealand art, the title points to the writers’ collective aim of presenting new ways of engaging with and thinking about his work. Hence their challenge to realise novel propositions for geometric abstraction, for ambitious local art practices, for cross-cultural appropriation and/or for histories of modernism. This is in the context of an artist who enjoys a sound if moderate bibliography, with notable contributions from Michael Dunn and, in particular, the late Francis Pound. This handsome addition to that record accompanies a touring retrospective exhibition curated by three of the book’s essayists: Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons and Julia Waite.  [Read more…]

Yielding Up Riches

Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Undreamed Of … 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship by Priscilla Pitts and Andrea Hotere (Otago University Press, 2017), 224 pp., $59.95

It’s tough being an artist in Aotearoa – it doesn’t exactly come with the flotilla of perks and acknowledgements one might find in countries less suspicious of culture. Even so, there is a lot more in the way of laurels available now than there was back when the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship was the only one. Established at the University of Otago in 1966 through the efforts of Charles Brasch (1909–1973), and named after the nation’s most famous expatriate artist, it has long been one of the most prestigious awards for a New Zealand artist, with the financial freedom of a lecturer’s salary, a studio to work in, and some of the most extraordinary cultural resources in the country. Unlike its sister fellowships, the Burns (writing) and the Mozart (music), the Hodgkins is something of an outlier in that the university has no art school; that’s the province of Otago Polytechnic – ‘Olam’ to Elam and Ilam – and a very fine producer of talent. [Read more…]