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Otago Daily Times
28-05-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Exposing the truth of the beautiful green
Twenty-five years after a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, leading New Zealand photographer Anne Noble returns with a collaborative exhibition depicting the degraded state of fresh water across Kāi Tahu tribal lands. She talks to Rebecca Fox about the role photography can have in public discourse. The signs say it all, 40 of them lined up precisely on a wall - ''warning toxic algae'', ''anglers and picnickers beware'', ''water may contain pollutants'' repeated over and over. Each one has been photographed by leading contemporary photographer Anne Noble as she journeyed around Canterbury and Southland with members of Kāi Tahu to capture the state of waterways, past and present, on Kāi Tahu tribal lands. No stranger to following the journey of rivers - Noble first came to national recognition for her work on the Whanganui River in the 1980s - she was engaged by Te Kura Taka Pini to create an extensive photographic archive of the waterways illustrating not only the devastation of waterways but also the resilience of whānau, hapū, and iwi striving to restore wai Māori, uphold rakatirataka, and protect mahika kai practices. The photos were used to support Kāi Tahu's statement of claim before the High Court in Christchurch seeking recognition of Kāi Tahu rakatirataka (authority) over wai Māori, fresh water, within their takiwā (area). ''Rivers are in my blood. The Whanganui project was a very personal story but that's a lifetime away. Today I'm much more interested in the politics of our relationship to water. There is a conflict between seeing and using rivers as an economic resource and how this impacts on rivers as living entities that are not separate from human and cultural needs and relationships. My hope is that this exhibition can provide a means to think about these things.'' It was important for Noble to clarify her role in the project as a non mana whenua contributor before she took up the project but she believes photography is a good medium to connect people to places they all inhabit, particularly those affected by various forces of degradation such as the increasing impacts on our waterways of intensive agriculture, forestry, and especially the intensification of dairy, in the South, in Canterbury and Southland. ''Photography is a great medium to insert itself into public discourse. If what the Ngai Tahu claim is wanting to establish is rakatirataka and partnership in managing the health and wellbeing of our waterways, then representation of the impacts of degradation and the impacts on people and their relationships to water is telling everybody's story. So we've worked together on a project that is supporting the Ngāi Tahu Statement of Claim - but it is also a story about water for all of us.''But she is quick to point out, this is not her story to tell. ''So, I've been there, [with] the privilege of seeing with people - through their eyes as it were - to bring something into the public domain. It is important to me that the stories that accompany the photographs are not mine.'' She has done so in her own way with ''Unutai e! Unutai e!'' at Dunedin Public Art Gallery by providing the photographs, while members of Kāi Tahu, who were plaintiffs in the High Court case, do the talking through their portraits and their stories of waterway degradation. For Noble it has highlighted how images of the landscape can often hide a lie. ''People will drive through New Zealand and they'll see the endless beautiful green. Underpinning the green is another story. The landscapes in this exhibition tell a different story. Yes, and it is not a pretty one.'' Close-ups of algae blooms and pivot irrigators contrast with aerial views of river and estuary mouths running green. ''These show degradation of water at what are often long-standing traditional mahinga kai sites. So these images point to the impact on mahinga kai customs and practices. All over Canterbury, all over Southland, you can see giant pivot irrigators. Reshaping the landscape. It's all about turning it green. ''And yet the impact of over-abstraction of water is something that you see evidence of when you visit the estuaries. And there's not enough flow in the river to turn the stones and clean the river.'' A portrait of Upoko o Kāi Te Ruahikihiki ki Ōtākou Edward Ellison sits beside one of a dry, empty paddock - what was Lake Tatawai, 24 hectares of water where the people who lived at the Māori Kāik (Maitapapa) and Ōtākou settlements would have sought out moulting ducks, īnaka (whitebait) and tuna (eels). ''You're up to your knees in mud these days, whereas back in the day you could see to the bottom through clear columns of water to gravelly lake and riverbeds,'' he says in the exhibition label. She created a collection of signs warning of toxic algae blooms and polluted waters and hung many of them together on one wall. Many were in traditional mahina kai sites. ''This collection of 40 signs is my idea of a landscape. Each of them is a beautiful little individual landscape that just happens to have a toxic water warning sign in the middle of it. All together they are a jolting reminder of what we are doing to our environment.'' It is her intention for the exhibition to offer an opportunity to stop, encounter the people, the places and, most importantly, the issues that underpin the Ngai Tahu claim for rakatiraka over wai Māori. ''Bring your attention really to things that are overlooked or not seen. The artistry or the concept is to make something that's inherently ugly incredibly beautiful. And in your then experience of something that is beautiful, yet toxic, is a state of confusion that amplifies something.'' She points to a close-up image of water flowing over rocks. Look closer and you can see algae growth. ''That would kill your dog.'' ''The role of art is to unsettle and to challenge as well as to uplift. And beauty can be very unsettling. If you look closely at some of these pictures - they are beautiful - but they are of very ugly things. When you've been conned, really, by beauty - then you have to go away and think about it, especially when you realise the reality being presented is not beautiful at all.'' Look at Lake Ellesmere (Te Waihora), Noble, who has an Arts Foundation Laureate Award and a New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography, says. ''It's a famous lake, very important to Ngāi Tahu. What is shown here are the state of three of the many rivers that flow into Te Waihora that all run through intensive dairy country. This lake is ranked as one of the worst in the world in terms of the state of its water.'' Another photograph shows a person lifting a whitebait net out of the river, basically covered in liquid cow manure. Given the impact for Kāi Tahu on mahinga kai customs and practices, Noble has given species such as tuna and inanga status and mana by creating ''portraits'' of them. Alongside are some ''little stories'' of the science being done to protect species such as a tuna monitoring project at Lake Whakatipu which is trying to understand the impacts on the important traditional food source. It seemed fitting for portraits of tuna that are abstract and ambiguous to end the exhibition, she says. Being able to amplify the surfaces of the tuna and turn them into a kind of ''magic moment'' is something only photography can do. ''Their skins are glorious, they're beautifully slithery, but it's like light and flashes of light in the water and it's just turning that into something a little more abstract.'' Some of the waterway images have been taken on a drone - a first and ''great adventure'' for Noble, who was excited by the ability it gave her to capture the water from a height even if she was petrified she was going to crash it. ''You get a sense of kind of the scale of things. And when light catches water from above you can see the world in the way that you can't as a short person with feet on the ground.'' She is happy to use any tool ''that is the right tool'' to capture the image she is after. Some images take hours to capture and others she does not know she has captured until she develops them. ''Photographs can be magical accidents. Sometimes you find you have much more in an image than what you actually saw at the time. And then when you recognise that you try and make sense of it and make sure that magic is there for others to find in the picture that you've created.'' The project also came along as Noble retired from teaching photography at Massey University College of Creative Arts, Toi Rauwharangi giving her the opportunity to focus full-time on her own work. ''I'm not afraid of big projects.'' The archive is a continuation of Noble's interest in environmental issues from her Antarctic series, mostly developed between 2001 and 2014, to her more recent work In the company of bees and her ongoing project In a Forest Dark . TO SEE ''Unutai e! Unutai e!'', Kāi Tahu & Anne Noble, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Saturday, May 31. 10.30am: Panel Discussion: Ki Uta Ki Tai: What is the future for our wai? 1pm: Exhibition Tour: Join Ōtākou whānau, Te Kura Taka Pini, and members of the Unutai e! Unutai e! working group on a tour of the exhibition 2.30pm: Performance: He Waka Kōtuia
Otago Daily Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Balloon fun at museum celebration
Photo: Linda Robertson Charlie Harris, 1, takes part in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's International Museum Day celebration yesterday. The exhibition "littleBIG" featured two very yellow and very popular artworks by Seung Yul Oh and Don Driver, the museum said. Entry was free. Balloon artist Pippity Pop performed as did Choir! Choir!.
Otago Daily Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Can't see the forest for the giant, yellow tentacles-like trees
A forest of large, yellow tentacles is taking over Dunedin — be prepared. Tomorrow, an exhibition called "ririkiRARAHI/littleBIG" will open at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. It features 40 massive yellow tentacle-like inflatables people can walk through. The artwork brings together two pieces, the smaller Yellow Tentacle Pram, made by artist Don Driver in 1980, and the large piece Periphery, by Seung Yul Oh, made in 2013-15. Dunedin Public Art Gallery technical specialist Jen Boland said Periphery was an artwork you could touch with "gentle hands". She said the yellow forest made it feel as if the "tentacles" from the smaller artwork had grown exponentially inside the room. "I saw this as that joy of those baby tentacles being fully grown and in their own space and having life — that's been the idea of 'littleBIG'." Ms Boland said having an art piece people could interact with was not only fun, but was also a great introduction to art for younger people. Dunedin Public Art Gallery technical specialist Jen Boland in among the forest of yellow tentacles from the ''littleBIG'' exhibition opening on Saturday. PHOTO: STEPHEN JAQUIERY "We wanted to have this in the gallery for winter because it's so bright, so happy and brings little bit of bright joy through the winter season." When the inflatables were gently nudged it looked as if they were swaying like a forest in the wind. The exhibition's layout will change every day as the artwork sways and moves around the room. "Smaller people might be a little bit scared, but there's ways to move through it quite gently where it doesn't need to be an intimidating thing." On Sunday, the museum will have yellow face painting available as well as an opportunity to make yellow balloon animals to go along with the installation. "ririkiRARAHI/littleBIG" will be open to the public for the next three months.
Otago Daily Times
03-05-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Prince of prints
Tom Chadwick, Wayside laundry, 1935, wood engraving on paper. Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Gifted 1953 by Sir Rex Nan Kivell of the Redfern Gallery, London. Established by Iain Macnab in 1925 in Pimlico, central London, the Grosvenor School of Modern Art is celebrated for its role in reviving an interest in printmaking in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, specifically the linocut. A painter and engraver, Macnab believed in the importance of a composition carrying a sense of movement, and the linocut offered a medium that could do this effectively through repetitive parallel lines. One influential proponent of the linocut was Claude Flight, who helped Macnab run the school from 1925-30 and taught a linocutting course. Offering space for experimentation, the Grosvenor School's approach was dynamic and versatile, the printing done by hand rather than using a press. It used easily accessible materials including linoleum flooring as printing blocks and the ribs of umbrellas as cutting tools. One student at the Grosvenor School in the 1930s was Tom Chadwick (1912-1942). Chadwick was born in Jamaica in 1912, his family returning to England in 1916. He studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art from 1932-36. From 1932-38, Chadwick produced several wood engravings while also working on commercial projects as an illustrator. He was a member of various societies in the 1930s, including the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers (1933), the Royal Society of British Artists (1935) and the Society of Artist-Printmakers (1936). In 1939, Chadwick joined the 3rd (The King's Own) Hussars, a cavalry regiment of the British Army, serving in Greece and North Africa during World War 2. He was killed in action at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, aged 30. While Chadwick's life was tragically cut short, he developed a reputation as an exceptional engraver who produced highly complex and detailed compositions. Iain Macnab referred to Chadwick as his "most brilliant student". Operating in parallel to the Grosvenor School was London's Redfern Gallery, established in 1923. The underlying objective of Redfern Gallery was complementary to the Grosvenor School — "to promote printmaking through commissioning editioned prints by leading British artists of the time". Born in Aotearoa, Sir Rex Nan Kivell (1898-1977) joined the Redfern Gallery in 1925, becoming the director in 1931. Chadwick's Wayside laundry (1935) sits within a large group of British prints that were gifted to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery by Kivell in 1953, other substantial holdings also gifted to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Produced during Chadwick's time at the Grosvenor School, Wayside laundry (1935) is on display in "Reviving the Print: The Grosvenor School of Modern Art", showing at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery until September 7. Lauren Gutsell is a curator at Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Otago Daily Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Art seen: April 24
"Precarious Existence", Jane Siddall and Rob Foote (The Artist's Room) "Precarious Existence" is a joint exhibition by two artists whose disparate styles nonetheless mesh together appealingly. Jane Siddall's impressive animal studies are created with two different media — wildly colourful pencil work, and more gentle, muted acrylic. Near-mirror symmetry plays a role in several of her works, notably the fantasy shelter of the two foxes in "Safe Haven". The wildlife of Africa and the Subcontinent is a major subject of the artist's images, with elephants and leopards inhabiting magic realist worlds of fabric and wallpaper patterns. Where Siddall's works are almost wilful in their kaleidoscope of colour, Rob Foote's work largely takes the opposite tack. Foote's pictures are quiet surrealist works of unbalanced structures and realms created in a soft sepia-toned charcoal. Humour is very much to the fore in several of the pieces, most obviously in Pac-Man-Hat-Tan and in the wry reworking of a famous image of 1920s construction workers, Angry Bird's Eye View . The two series of works gain connection through a small series of paintings of brightly coloured insects by Foote in acrylic on wallpaper. The vibrancy of these works and the patterned backgrounds tie in perfectly with Siddall's vivid animal scenes. Yuki Kihara (Milford Gallery) Yuki Kihara's exploration of personal and colonial history extends in "Presence in Absence" with a series of lenticular images indicating the passage from the past to the future. In the works, we see Kihara's Victorian-era alter-ego, Salome, as she passes through a changing world. We sense her navigation through space and time, and become aware of the changes not only in her existence but also in our own, as well as the ephemeral nature of the individual lifetime. The clever use of lenticular photographs, which shift and shimmer between images as the viewer moves around them, allows us to be aware of this motion through the plane of earthly existence. The photography is excellent and the works are beautifully presented. The figures and trees move within the picture frame, growing and developing as time passes. We sense the presence and the absence as morning turns through afternoon to evening in the scenes. The central work in the display, a single panoramic photograph, brings suggestions of the journey of societies through time. Kihara's Pacific Island heritage is hinted at in props such as the 'ava bowl and the Bible, representative of the traditional and colonial influences which have shaped Pacific society. "Fault Lines" (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) There are times when representation cannot express the intangible or the ineffable. It is at times like these the power of abstract art comes to the fore. In "Fault Lines", the Dunedin Public Art Gallery presents work by several top New Zealand abstractionists whose work has not only confounded expectation but has challenged the very nature of the art object and its relationship with the gallery space. From Julian Dashper and Oliver Perkins' questioning of the nature of the framed image, to the soul-deep hurt of Ralph Hotere's lament for the lost land of Port Chalmers' Observation Point, we are presented with works which require thought on the part of the viewer. These are not easy pieces, but they are worthwhile. Perhaps the most accessible work is the gestural sweep of Gretchen Albrecht's Cardinal , its hemisphere divided into two vibrating fields of colour. The artist's message, of the passage of life, death, and rebirthas told from a Christian perspective, may not be readily evident to a casual glance, but the sheer power of the colour makes this a hypnotic piece. While work by Don Driver and Don Peebles may not have the immediacy of Albrecht's colours, their playful use of found objects within their constructions produces work that delights as it confounds. By James Dignan
