matakite

John Walsh Matakite catalogue sponsored by The Post Family Trust via the Pataka Foundation

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matakite19 June – 18 September, 2016pataka art + museum

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Marakihau, 2013Oil on unstretched canvas1440 x 2900mmCollection of the artist

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MATAKITE is a name Maori give to a visionary, one with second sight who perceives life in translucent, overlapping layers of time and space. Walsh’s paintings of monumental landscapes populated by mysterious anthropomorphic creatures offer us, as ordinary mortals, a glimpse into a realm we may have heard described in matauranga Maori but never fully imagined. Walsh’s technical abilities as a painter and his imaginings entwine to create images that float between the physical world and what might lie beyond.

Of Aitanga a Hauiti and New Zealand Irish heritage, Walsh had a small town East Coast upbringing. His adventurer forbears, who sailed into the wilds to discover this land, have always been his inspiration. During his career, this has at times seen him at odds with more traditionally-minded approaches.

Writers position Walsh as a Maori artist of mythological worlds. While he escapes such nets, he uses them as part of his vocabulary to speak of issues of interest—voyaging, the environment, dogma, power-play, beauty and relationships. In so doing, he has become a recognised figure on the New Zealand arts landscape who continues to explore freely.

Nothing is quite as it seems. Walsh presents ideas for viewers to explore, often working through them on the canvas. His language is endearing, intriguing, poetic, sensuous and mysterious. Contemporary issues are presented by ancient

Matakite

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Herehereuma I, 2010 Oil on canvas 1110 x 1520mm Private Collection

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beings who come with their own stories while older issues are presented by sweet young lovers. We can wander beyond his dark headlands before “being caught in the wispy, foreground brush strokes that become the eyes of a messenger.”1

Fellow artist and close friend John Pule believes the driving purpose of Walsh’s work “is to show the beginning of first nation creatures… to depict quintessential fears … and raise important questions about finding a place in the world, why we must keep fighting to survive, why we must keep caring.”2 Others describe Walsh as operating in a territory that combines a painterly take on New Zealand light and landscape with Maori signifiers.3 Such territory can be tricky to navigate when myths and stories are jealously guarded. Walsh acknowledges this and generally chooses to avoid references to specific tribal narratives: “I’m orchestrating my own characters and stories. Sometimes I reference specific incidents, but generally I’m making them up, constructing stories and metaphors around current events and issues that beg comment.”4 To this end, the eerie settings for his densely layered narratives are usually non-specific yet strangely familiar.

On the rare occasions when Walsh paints existing landscapes, he exaggerates the topography with dramatic lighting and shrouds the scene with dense atmosphere. The two paintings of Herehereuma bluff, inland from Gisborne, are prime examples. Walsh’s paintings of Otuhawaiki Pa atop Herehereuma were commissioned by the current landowners, who remain captivated by the history and awesome presence of the site. The bluff was a refuge for Nga Ariki Kaiputahi when under attack and is named after the 1820s victory over Bay of Plenty invaders. Walsh describes these paintings as “a

1 WALSH, John and Louise. In correspondence with the author, May 2016.

2 PULE, John. Whakawhenua: responses to paintings by John Walsh in the exhibition Flying Solo, The Dowse Art Museum, 2009.

3 GIFFORD, Andrew. NZ Herald, 19 Sept 2009.

4 WALSH, John. ibid.

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Herehereuma II, 2012 Oil on canvas 1110 x 1520mm Private Collection

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delicate dance between capturing the site’s spirit and affirming the whakapapa of Nga Ariki Kaiputahi to their lands.”5

Maintaining relationships with ancestors enables us to connect with the mythical world, even though it’s often “a universe away from how we live now”.6 Walsh’s works reflect this belief and demonstrate his aptitude to merge ancient myths with contemporary reality.

In Act 2, Scene 2, painted within a year of the first Herehereuma work, Walsh superimposes mythic creatures over the precipitous landforms he sailed through in remote parts of Fiordland. At two metres high and over five metres wide, this massive panorama fills any viewer’s peripheral vision. The painting envelops the viewer’s senses, transporting them to an extraordinary realm where a flotilla of marakihau (allegorical guardians, part-human, part-fish, and part-waka) ferry spectral human cargo across rugged cliff faces. An often forgotten extension to the title suggests more of the artist’s intent: There are visitors at the Head and they don’t look friendly. Come. Let your demon go, you can catch him again later. This is a snippet of conversation between a marakihau and his passengers, between artist and viewer.

Among the kaleidoscopic influences that inundated him as a boy, Walsh became familiar with the cast of anthropomorphic creatures carved into the wharenui at Hauiti, Tolaga Bay. This youthful fascination with the stories of Aotearoa grew during his travels and developed into a passion when he began working at Tairawhiti Museum, Gisborne in the late 1980s, then the National Museum, now Te Papa, in 1993. It was here that Walsh made an emotional connection with marakihau: “When I started working at Te Papa, Aunty Bessie Walters

5 WALSH, John. In correspondence with the author, May 2016.

6 WALSH, John. Quoted by, Cushla Parekowhai, Real Art Roadshow: The Book, Real Art Roadshow Trust, 2009 (page 240).

overleaf: I Can’t Stop Loving You, 2012Oil on unstretched canvas2000 x 5000mmCollection of the artist

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from Tolaga was there. She’d been living in Wellington for years. She took me to the Maori collection and introduced me to pieces from home. She showed me a paepae board, the step onto the meeting house porch. It had this marakihau carved in shallow relief. He seemed to be swimming though time. It was stunning.”7 The recurrence of marakihau in Walsh’s paintings during the past two decades suggests he has developed a strong affinity with this otherworldly being. Apart from Act 2, Scene 2, Walsh usually represents marakihau as lone swimmers. Sometimes, as in Marakihau (post homo travellus), they are ferrying smaller, more vulnerable creatures through dark waters, but they usually appear alone. The life of artists can also be solitary as they labour to realise their visions. Could Walsh’s portrayals of marakihau be allegorical self-portraits?

Walsh’s protagonists are rarely earthbound. In Wiremu Passes Over a Peak of Nesting Manaia, Wiremu glides effortlessly through the air, high above a lofty nest of manaia (bird-men); in The Lady and her Attendants, a grand lady casts off across an abyss on an air-borne raft with her household, apparently supported by nothing but their faith; and in They’re from up North, Very Quiet People, another air-borne craft, this time a traditional waka, is steered through the air high above a Northland landscape. Weightlessness while journeying is a recurring theme in Walsh’s work, as is the company of tiki-faced supernatural beings, keenly observant creatures who initially appear amusingly cheeky but ultimately engender feelings of unease. The act of taking flight is often romanticised through notions of freedom and abandonment, but it’s also an instinctive response to fear. As Pule says, “the principal gene in fear is flight… a phenomenon [also] associated with passports and

7 WALSH, John. Quoted in conversation with, Clive Kelly: In the Land: talking with John Walsh about painting, Art New Zealand 148, Summer 2013–14 (page 51).

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visa … All these become addicted to looking for paradise.”8 Francis Bacon, a great master of images of unease, said

whenever an artist paints a subject, whatever that subject is, they’re also painting something of themselves.9 This could be taken to mean they’re revealing their innermost thoughts, aspirations and fears. This certainly applies to Walsh. His painted dreams seem to want to reconnect with an ancient, less complicated existence, a time when humans were intrinsically connected to natural and supernatural forces. This state, he appears to tell us, isn’t as far out of our reach as we may think.

In The Departure Lounge, we witness the transformative energy of a female soul burning brightly as she begins to leave this world. Another work, I Can’t Stop Loving You, prompted by the passing of Walsh’s good friend Jim Vivieaere, also speaks of souls travelling to another dimension. Here we see a kaumatua in a feather korowai looking down from the tree branch on which he stands to a misty stream flowing out past settlements and islands to the great beyond. He is joined by an adolescent boy, sadly following his elder’s gaze, and a pair of angelic backing vocalists caught in the chorus of the Ray Charles’ song that Walsh couldn’t get out of his head while painting this work. The perspective creates the illusion of the viewer looking down from above, adding to the sense we are somehow intruding on a sensitive moment. This image could be read as the culmination of the theme of journeying souls that often flows through Walsh’s work. Perhaps future works will sever the link with mortals completely and exist purely in worlds beyond. Who knows where Walsh’s adventurous, inquisitive explorations will take us?Mark Hutchins-Pond, curator

8 PULE, John. ibid.

9 BACON, Francis. Fragments of a Portrait, filmed interview of Francis Bacon by David Sylvester, broadcast on BBC 1, 18 September, 1966.

overleaf:Act 2, Scene 2, There are visitors at the Head and they don’t look friendly. Come. Let your demon go, you can catch him again later, 2010Oil on unstretched canvas2200 x 5200mmPrivate Collection

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Artist bio

JOHN WALSH was born in 1954 in Hauiti, Tolaga Bay, Gisborne, of Aitanga a Hauiti/New Zealand Irish descent. He attended Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University in 1973–74 but considers himself to be mainly self-taught. During the mid-70s he juggled painting with seasonal employ-ment. His earliest works took the form of realist portraits of people he knew on the East Coast, culminating in a mural over 18 metres long entitled Portrait of Tolaga Bay, featuring many identities from the local community. This, in turn, led to employment in marae restoration, first at Rongopai (Te Kooti’s whare at Patutahi) then on other marae on the coast. In the late 1970s, Walsh became involved in running arts programmes for East Coast communities and participating in Nga Puna Waihanga hui throughout the country.

From 1985 to 1988, he taught art at Tairawhiti Polytechnic. During 1988–89, Walsh was a fisherman on a deep sea Japanese trawler fishing the Southern Ocean. He then travelled to New York to participate in the Pathfinder International Mural Project in Greenwich Village for three months. When he returned to New Zealand, he joined the staff of Tairawhiti Museum, Gisborne.

In 1993, Walsh moved to Wellington with his family to take up his appointment as curator of contemporary Maori art at the National Art Gallery (now Te Papa). Around this time, he arrived at the artistic style for which he has become well-known. In 2002, Walsh ceased working at Te Papa to dedicate himself full time to his painting.

Walsh has regularly exhibited throughout New Zealand and occasionally beyond for the last two decades. His works feature in the permanent collections of The James Wallace Arts Trust, Te Papa Tongarewa, the Sarjeant Gallery and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea, New Caledonia.

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List of works

Act 2, Scene 2, There are visitors at the Head and they don’t look friendly. Come. Let your demon go, you can catch him again later, 2010Oil on unstretched canvas2200 x 5200mmPrivate Collection

I Can’t Stop Loving You, 2012Oil on unstretched canvas2000 x 5000mmCollection of the artist

The Departure Lounge, 2013Oil on unstretched canvas1550 x 3330mmCollection of the artist, courtesy of Milford Galleries, Dunedin

Marakihau, 2013Oil on unstretched canvas1440 x 2900mmCollection of the artist

Herehereuma I, 2010 Oil on canvas 1110 x 1520mm Private Collection

Herehereuma II, 2012 Oil on canvas 1110 x 1520mm Private Collection

The Black Legged Navigator, 2006 Oil on canvas1400 x 2000mm Collection of the artist Marakihau (post homo travellus), 2007Oil on canvas1100 x 2400mm Private Collection

They’re from the North, Very Quiet People, 2009Oil on canvas915 x 1220mmPrivate Collection

Not Lost in Fiordland, 2010Oil on board 900 x 1220mm Private Collection

The Lady and her Attendants, 2010Oil on canvas 2000 x 1400mmCollection of The Northern Club, Auckland  

Wiremu Passes Over a Peak of Nesting Manaia, 2007Oil on canvas 1400 x 2000mmPrivate Collection

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition:John Walsh: MatakitePataka Art + Museum19 June – 18 September 2016

© 2016 Pataka Art + Museum

The views and opinions expressed in this catalogue are those of the authors, unless otherwise stated. No material, whether written or photographic, may be reproduced without permission of the artist, authors or Pataka Art + Museum.

www.pataka.org.nz Cnr Norrie & Parumoana Sts, PO Box 50 218, Porirua City 5240, New Zealand Ph: +64 4 237 1511

curator: Mark Hutchins-Pond publication design: Sarah Maxeyphotography: All artworks were photographed by Michael Hall, courtesy of the artist.catalogue sponsor: The Post Family Trust via the Pataka Foundationprinter: Service Printers Limited

cover image: Wiremu Passes Over a Peak of Nesting Manaia, (detail), 2007.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On behalf of Pataka Art + Museum, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Post Family Trust for sponsoring the publication of this catalogue. I wish to express our sincere thanks to all the private lenders of artworks to this exhibition, many of whom have been left with empty walls in their homes for its duration. Thanks also to John Gow and his staff at Gow Langs-ford Gallery, Auckland, for kindly facilitating most of these private loans.

A debt of gratitude is owed to John Pule for allowing me to quote from his impassioned and insightful prose on John Walsh’s practice.

John Walsh: Matakite is the second major solo exhibition of Walsh’s paintings to be presented by Pataka Art + Museum and, once again, it has been a pleasure and a privilege for us to work with John to realise such a project.

Mark Hutchins-Pond, curator, Pataka Art + Museum

Marakihau (post homo travellus), 2007.

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matakite

John Walsh Matakite catalogue sponsored by The Post Family Trust via the Pataka Foundation

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