Doing up an old image of ourselves
Atrip down the spine of Te-Ikaa-Ma¯ ui, rising to crisper air across the central North Island, means spectacular views of eroding hills and snow-clad mountains, punctuated by dilapidated farming sheds and the odd abandoned cottage.
Assemblages of sawn timber and rusty corrugated iron, falling broken into piles – year by year, there are fewer.
For city folk it’s all eminently photographable. Such objects in the landscape provide nostalgia, stand-ins for stories of the past or memories, that gazing on a well-maintained house won’t bring.
For decades these have been our romantic ruins, our colonial gothic. Yet that view has little to do with the communities and the changes to the land in their background. We fly straight through.
Talking to this tradition are two exhibitions. The first at New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pu¯ kenga Whakaata has the people of Ka¯ kahi in the King Country as its subject – a wee village of about 50 households – but in relationship to two generations of artists, the late painter Peter McIntyre and his daughter, photographer Sara McIntyre.
Mist on the hills, gutter gardens, handpainted signs and worn weatherboards – Sara McIntyre does capture the picturesque contrasts on offer (who could resist), but these aren’t her core focus.
Here and in her magnificent 2020 book, Observations of a Rural Nurse at Ka¯ kahi, she opens doors, introducing us to diverse Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ communities: people who’ve lived here a long time, who’ve returned to be close to marae, or renegades. Absent are wealthy bach owners and property investors.
These aren’t drive-by relationships. One photograph is of a signpost at an unsealed junction: ‘‘Peter McIntyre Street’’ points one way, ‘‘Dahya Lala Drive’’ the other. The Lalas have run a general store in Ka¯ kahi for over 60 years. Patti and Peter McIntyre bought a bach here in 1960 when Sara and her brother, Simon, were children.
Though their parents have passed, the children have extended the old family home and Sara McIntyre has done up a derelict cottage on the property. She lives there permanently. Her images of home interiors are filled with framed photographs of ancestors and personal taonga.
Stories are part of what makes for a rewarding exhibition and book. Sara recalls meeting another nurse, Jane Johnston, at the Wellington neonatal unit. Turns out she’d played with her siblings as a child. A day earlier Sara had been thinking about selling a painting of Jane’s brother David in the sheepyards, so she could afford a
builder to restore her Ka¯ kahi home. Not only did Jane want to buy the painting for David, it turned out he was also a builder.
Sara’s book follows her father’s own 50 years ago, 1972’s Kakahi New Zealand. Peter McIntyre’s books were very popular – just as the McIntyres enjoyed the escape to Ka¯ kahi from Wellington, people escaped into his book’s pages. The works often romanticise scenes of rural decay, speaking of a golden past rather than the issues of the time. ‘‘Like a western movie set awaiting the actors,’’ Peter once wrote.
In this exhibition, most of the words are Peter’s and often reveal deeper connections to Ka¯ kahi than the paintings. Though they are technically accomplished, I’ve always struggled with his postwar paintings’ illustrative sentimentality. Honeyed scenes, as if suspended in resin, or kauri gum.
Yet the relationship to place here is complex. Photographed behind the counter at the general store, Manu Lala (son of Dahya) wished to have Peter’s books directly behind him on the shelf. A painting by Peter of children before church and marae has as much love as it does pose-forthe-camera postcard saleability. Sara shoots a similar scene, but lets the children play.
In a way Sara is answering her father back – going to the people behind the painted facades, but also carrying a cultural history forward to consider what it tells us. It’s a brave project, transcending the
personal to help re-evaluate urban relationships to this hinterland.
At Page Galleries, the slivers of landscape and other weathered props that painter Michael Hight serves up, sharply lit on shelves, are recognisable from State Highway drives.
Crisply painted, like the air up there, I spy the cliffs along the Rangitı¯kei, and the snowy peaks of Taranaki, Ruapehu and Nga¯ uruhoe. Yet all are surreally housed as ornaments alongside other rural mementos of time: an old radio, a Pierrot clown costume, beehive stacks, a structure of iron and ma¯ nuka sticks.
The scale and assortment of these items pushes them into new tensions. Things don’t quite fit. There’s a sophisticated play in paint with light and dark. Sharply lit, big shadows are cast, and items are askew, given edge before the black.
It’s an accomplished form of object theatre, and you have to build your own stories. The work will stand in for your own home ornaments – Michael Hight welcomes our nostalgia, but then he disturbs it.
Ka¯ kahi: Peter and Sara McIntyre, New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pu¯ kenga Whakaata, until May 16. Michael Hight, Page Galleries until April 24.