‘‘Landfall Exhibition’’
(Otago Arts Society)
AS Rebecca Fox has recently noted, a large group exhibition that celebrates the crosspollination of art and literature opened last week at the Otago Art Society. Artists were asked to respond to any issue of Landfall, the longest running literary and arts journal in New Zealand. The responses span a range of media including painting, print, sculpture, ceramics and textiles.
Dunedinbased artist Madeleine Child chose to respond to a poem by Sam Hunt titled
Postcard of a Cabbage Tree, published in
Landfall 92 in December 1969. Child drew her inspiration from a twicerepeated line, ‘‘an old flatfooted cabbage tree’’, choosing to fuse adjectival description (‘‘old flatfooted’’) with subject (‘‘cabbage tree’’) to invent a new hybrid being: a flatfooted cabbage tree. In Child’s ceramic work a slender ochre and brown leg with one very large, flat foot emerges from a cabbage trees characteristic frond skirt topped by foliage resembling a Dr Seuss haircut.
In a complex chain of responses, Sharon Singer created a cubistinspired painting in response to a prose account of cubist artist Braque by artist and writer John Tarlton. That is, Singer responded in a cubist style to the cubist artist Braque as mediated by John Tarlton (published in Landfall 117, March 1976). Singer’s sky is fragmented in the style of Braque’s cubism, but is full of Aramoana light.