Chart a course for central west coast
Joanna Davis drives from Taranaki to Manawatū to see the beautiful objet d’art along the Coastal Arts Trail.
‘Ilike beautiful things,’’ Pokapū art gallery owner Andrea Leighton says. Standing in her gallery showroom in Bulls, she swings her arm to get the pūrerehua (traditional Māori musical instrument) turning.
The artwork in her hand is a lasercarved wooden piece, the size and shape of a leaf, and once she gets the trajectory right, it emits its distinctive whirring buzz – as heard in the opening scene of Once Were Warriors.
Leighton is clearly delighted.
The piece is just one the former wholesale food sales representative sells in her gallery, in a midlife quest to ‘‘re-engineer her life towards more beautiful things’’.
That sounds like a noble goal, and one I’m on board with this long weekend, as I drive the Coastal Arts Trail from New Plymouth to Whanganui, and on to Palmerston North.
My mother and I are travelling together, and if it wasn’t for a breakdown, we would have been on the road in Vallery, a campervan that doubles as its own quirky gallery – with 50 pieces of art from 25 artists built into its decor.
It is probably just as well Vallery is out of commission as the only other time Mum and I hired a campervan, 20-odd years ago, I backed it into a Saab outside the Polynesian Spa in Rotorua.
We start in New Plymouth and I am enchanted instantly. It has Pukekura Park (why doesn’t every park have its own artificial waterfall?) and the coastal walkway – a 13.2km waterfront path – with Mt Taranaki rising in every vista.
But we are there for the art, and New Plymouth delivers.
A first stop is to the Len Lye Centre/ Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand’s only single-artist gallery.
The outside is crazy enough, with its towering, wavy, polished stainless steel walls, reflecting one of the town’s oldest buildings, the 1844 White Hart Hotel.
One exhibit is Lye’s Sky Snakes kinetic sculpture, which is a full room of 41⁄ metre lengths of ball chain dancing in the sky for 10 crazy minutes each half hour.
We call on ceramicist Maria Brockhill, known for her brightly coloured, often botanical, works.
Bell Block, where Brockhill’s Clay Art studio is located, is ‘‘a bit out of the way’’, she says, but it has so much room for her shopfront, huge work space and three kilns.
Brockhill says the colour in her pieces reflects her mood. A former office worker, she took advantage of the change in circumstances that motherhood brought her in 1998.
She wants people to touch her dotted vases, kawakawa leaf receptacles, nı¯kau palm works. I take one away with me, which is to be a recurring theme.
The first night we stay in splendour at Hosking House, a grand villa restored by its owner such that it feels like art itself. Our rooms each have a clawfoot bath, and the sheets are white and crisp.
Before leaving the next day, we stop at Paul Maseyk’s Kingsroy Gallery.
His highly decorated work is woodfired, which he tells me takes perseverance. He lights a fire at 5am, which slowly gets more intense over the day. The wood ash and variable temperature give his work its variation.
We head to Whanganui, which unbeknown to me, is famous for glass art. I am about to be educated at our first stop, the New Zealand Glassworks – Te Whare Tūhua o Te Ao.
Sadly, we weren’t there on a day when glass artists were working. But we loved looking at the myriad glossy designs.
We are given a warm welcome when we check in to centrally located The Avenue Wanganui, where the rooms are being renovated to a high standard.
Sunday is a good day to be in Whanganui, a place I hadn’t been for 20 years. Since September, the former down-at-heel Castlecliff neighbourhood brims with people, tunes and food trucks from 4pm to 7pm.
In his gallery along the road, Ivan Vostinar is working on a sculptural piece. It is novel to enter a gallery through a room dedicated to bouldering, but this one has a climbing wall with half-metrethick mats and multi-coloured holds up
the wall. It is apparently well used by kiln. I convince her to take me to the city’s the artist and his children. public gallery, Te Manawa, where a group
Vostinar chose Whanganui to live and she founded, Women’s Art Initiative, work as it has ‘‘the best arts scene per which uses art-making as a form of capita in the country’’. He attributes some resistance to violence, is staging an of that to cheap real estate and the town’s exhibition. grittiness. Seccombe’s own work is in glass. ‘‘I use
He mixes creating his own organic glass because I value light.’’ abstract work with some more quotidian This part of New Zealand is killing it tableware, which he sells at wholesale for creativity. prices to make it accessible to all. For our final night, we stay at The Last
Back on the road, wēmakeatAtheshortChurch piti, an Airbnb that is a trip to Palmerston North, and find it spectacular church renovation that is, competing for arts scene prominence too. fittingly, a work of art itself.
At Square Edge, the town’s community art space, there is exhibition space, studio spaces, a cafe, arts therapy room and a music suite, where a child is practising on the grand piano when we visit, his brother asleep on a bench nearby.
There are workshops in almost any genre, and artistic director Karen
Seccombe shows us the new ceramic workroom, with four wheels and a new
The Coastal Arts Trail is a new art tourism experience, featuring more than 50 stops across the lower west coast of the North Island.