Ngai Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Ngati Kahungunu & Celtic decent ~
arts facilitator, community arts writer, art maker.
ART WORKSHOP
I am a self taught art maker. I started drawing when I was nine and went to an art school for kids set up by art educator, Gordon Tovey at King Edward Technical College in Dunedin (1956). Art making continued informally into adult life alongside songwriting, recording and live performance.
In the time of the Settlement of Ngai Tahu with the Crown, the arts were seen as way to move the tribe forward and away from grievance. I facilitated events featuring the work and thinking of Ngai Tahu artists across performing, visual and language arts disciplines & after four dynamic years, change was on my horizon. I was interested in the application of the arts as a tool to build and strengthen skill amongst people groups and communities where there was less opportunity for creative development.
Between 2003 and 2009 I trialled arts programmes as a tool amongst prisoners in Canterbury Prisons. The idea was to use the arts as a way to think about vision and goals for their future and the challenges that stopped progress of those goals. I made art alongside men, women and youth, and took small collections of work to public audiences outside the wire. There were a number of smaller and some large scale works and events developed over a period of 6 years including the Ruia Prison Arts Fund Raising exhibition (see Prison Art pages).
I received an Arts Access Aotearoa National Award for Arts Services to Prisoners in 2007. On the back of that I joined two other writers to develop a National Prison Art Strategy for Arts Access Aotearoa and the Department of Corrections Wellington (2008-2012). That work was commissioned in the global economic downturn of 2008 - 2009, the new John Key government and a complex restructuring of government departments including NZ prisons. This meant the strategy would be developed against a background of deconstruction.
In this period I met with The Learning Connexion who were delivering NZQA programmes to prisoner populations across New Zealand. I was offered a series of scholarships between 2010 and 2015 that would familiarise me with their entire curriculum, activate a formal arts practice and introduce me to an understanding of materiality; the use of art making materials that would built the narrative of work. (See Arts Workshop).
2015 - GROUNDWORK / NAVIGATION / WHAKATAATUTU The Learning Connexion, Wellington
9 December 2014October 6th 2014 marked the start of full-time painting & drawing scholarship with The Learning Connexion in Wellington NZ mentored by Peter Adsett (Melbourne). I'm eight weeks into the Advanced Level 7 course realising I have little language for the territory I find myself. Through the course of study and experimentation around process, materiality and horizontality the white paint on black builder's paper works arrived. These works use both paint and the builder's paper as structures. White being the floor and black working as a wall... A key element of the work is an indicator of time.
February 2015 started with a slow response to 'shifters' - elements in 2D works that cause a work to shift, focus or refocus. The elements of line, linguistics, colour, shadow, on existent images / collage etc are used to prioritise or bring the purpose of the work into clear view.
In the month of March / April 2015 - site specific work was inspired by shadows on concrete stairs in an outdoor auditorium I noticed 18 months earlier. My focus was the uniform lines of moving shadow. The resulting photographs prompt the geometric lines / patterns / grids reminiscent of navigational histories.
I manipulated images to meet/align/respond to instinct, and in fact discovered marks that I'd been making for almost 20 years. I began considering how or if the images could be progressed to respond to course directives of materiality, process, verticality, horizontality, structure and ground. They could. Armed with 12 gram unprimed tent canvas, eyeleted for easy transportation, I started experimenting with charcoal brushed wet into the grain of the fabric. I used photos for reference and began to navigate the dark spaces that opened up. One unresolved work although finished, led to another.
Navigating seemed to be the governing aspect of this work; unchartered spaces of faith, unknown earth and ocean, ideas of measuring, surveying and charting depths / learning in the dark ... to arrive at a point of resolve. Seven x 2 metre works were made. Five were shown as a series, in a graduation exhibition, along with initiating photographic notes.
