An Ideal Landscape

In an Ideal Landscape we present to you three of New Zealand’s pre-eminent artists of our time; Bill Hammond, Colin McCahon and Robin White.

The works included in this exhibition, have all been gifted in different ways, in another time. All are unified as they act as markers of significant and defining relationships of affection and friendship, spanning time and space.

The mana bestowed on these friendships is imbued in the very fabric of these works. Sons to mothers, star-crossed love and friendship formed in the distant atolls of the Pacific.

Colin McCahon - Manakau
Colin McCahon’s ‘Manakau' (view from Butler’s store) was painted in 1954, in one of the most prolific periods of McCahon's life. He and his family enjoyed a long, hot Auckland summer after relocating from Christchurch. His children were tanned, his wife Anne was happy to be settled in their little house in the Waitakares and McCahon took in the surrounding vista.

Gone were the religious motifs he was so well known for, replacing them instead were the glades of Kauri, the steep hills rising up from hills French Bay. Influences of Ingres playing on his mind.

For most of 1953 McCahon painted a series of work looking back towards Auckland, but in 1954 he turned around and took in the trees on the hills overlooking Manakau harbour. Turning his back on the city and focusing on the curve of the bays merging with trees and the wide harbour inlet, with blue skies and billowing clouds. 

Bill Hammond - Untitled
Bill Hammond always sought out nature. He was often on hiking trips with his old school friends from Christchurch’s Burnside High School. He always slept in his own tent he carried with him, despite the weight of the old fashnioned canvas.. Not for him the enclosed dormitory of a DOC hut.

After one such adventure on the Heaphy track, he decided to up-cycle his damaged tent into a canvas for this painting. 

Who are the faces inhabiting this canvas? Skull, human, bird, half-bird, half-human.  Hammond’s bird motifs occupy his practice after he visited a ‘birdland’ in the Auckland Islands in 1989. A primeval place with little human touch, it gave Hammond a touchstone to centre his concerns about the impact of colonisation on the natural world he so loved, but also to uplift his artistic practice and become an important signifier of his work. 

Robin White – Healing with Plants
Robin White spent 17 years practicing her art over 3,000 kilometres away from New Zealand on the atolls of Kiribati. While there she met two doctors who had worked on the remote Gilbert and Ellis Island (that later became Kiribati) for decades. Upon leaving the people and their lives on these scattered atolls, the husband purchased this work from Robin White as a gift to his wife, also a healing presence under the vast Pacific sky.