Into the Light
An extract from Bridget Hackshaw’s book, which explores James Hackshaw, Colin McCahon and Paul Dibble’s hidden-in-plain-sight collaborative projects.
The work architect James Hackshaw, painter Colin McCahon and sculptor Paul Dibble did together between 1965 to 1979, a critical period in New Zealand’s modern cultural history, resulted in a dozen buildings designed to serve diverse local communities, and, in three instances, families. However, to date much of the work has been virtually invisible and, in some cases, badly neglected.
By his own account, the series of windows McCahon designed for these eight churches and chapels, three private houses and one school block were not only important in their own right but also critical to the development of his painting. Yet until now, they have been barely mentioned in the great mass of commentary and scholarship about his art.
My part in telling this story began in 1999, the year my father, the architect James Hackshaw, died. We began our conversation when he was already quite ill, and we talked over several weeks. I took notes while he described in some detail his work with McCahon and Dibble across their 14 years of collaboration. After he died, I shelved these notes for a long time, however, I must have known I would come back to the subject one day.
At the time of his death in 1987, McCahon was recognised as one of New Zealand’s most influential modern artists. Dibble’s career had gained momentum since his collaborations with my father and McCahon, and by the 1980s his work was well represented in private and public collections. His Southern Stand New Zealand war memorial, unveiled in 2006 at Hyde Park Corner in London, cemented his international reputation.
I was puzzled that their work together remained hidden in plain sight in buildings dotted around suburban Auckland and appeared to arouse next to no curiosity. The collaboration had seemingly faded from view, with one notable exception — the clerestory windows in the convent in Upland Road, Remuera. But as for the other collaborations between my father, McCahon
and Dibble, if they have been mentioned at all in the past 20 years, it’s been in fairly vague terms. In 2007, a leaflet by Professor Andrew Barrie from the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning was all I could find on record when I started trying to piece the story together and venturing out with my camera to track down what remained of the collaborations.
What drew me back to this body of work? Curiosity, certainly, but more a sense of the need for it to be added to the public record. Having been raised and educated by Catholics, I had some understanding of McCahon’s religious symbolism. I knew some of the people involved in the story and I was familiar enough with the protagonists’ work to attempt to document it.
My father’s drawings and photographs were in the archives of the University of Auckland School of Architecture. I could start there. So, in 2018 I began photographing and researching the buildings, windows and sculptures created by these three people, as well as the culturally rich and generous communities of people associated with them.
The story of the collaboration between Hackshaw, McCahon and Dibble began in 1965 with the Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Bishop Delargey, who was fresh back from three years in Rome attending the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II. The council had directed that there was to be full and active participation in the Mass by lay people and women, that Mass should be conducted in English, that the Church was to be more open, and that collaboration with other religions was to be encouraged. Delargey had been exploring many of these ideas prior to Vatican II, and once he was back in Auckland he was excited to have the opportunity to implement them. My father was engaged by Delargey to design a convent in Upland Road, Remuera, and began looking around for collaborators.
The Upland Road chapel windows needed to reflect religious ideas, so it was important to find an artist who wanted to work in a religious language. Architect Morton Jordan, who worked with my father, suggested that they approach his friend Colin McCahon. McCahon had demonstrated his understanding of the liturgy and the symbols of the Christian Church in works such as The Wake (1958) and the Elias series (1959), and was very keen to do the work. The Upland Road chapel and the church commissions that followed gave him a chance to be ‘working towards meaning, in a real situation’; it gave him deep satisfaction.
My father was also looking for a sculptor who could make a bronze tabernacle and candlesticks for this first Catholic commission. He had already met several prominent sculptors. However, McCahon knew a talented sculptor, Paul Dibble, among his students at the Elam and suggested they meet him. For Dibble, who was just 22, this
was an opportunity to work with bronze, a notoriously expensive material, and on a large scale. He ended up casting not only the bronze works for Upland Road but also the subsequent church commissions at his flat in Mount Eden, or in the backyards of other houses he rented, getting up with his flatmates through the night to feed the fire in his makeshift foundries.
Most artwork in New Zealand Catholic churches in the 1960s and 1970s was imported from Italy or Australia and reflected a European aesthetic. Painted plaster statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the saints, for example, were often sentimental and colourful renditions. But the materials and landscapes of this trio’s works are ours. The window McCahon designed in 1969 for St Patrick’s Church in Te Puke, for example, has the shape of a hill signifying Calvary, but Te Puke means ‘‘hill’’, and so for McCahon it was very much a local hill. Paul Dibble has commented on McCahon’s extraordinary ability to take the local and make it international, and my father admired the way McCahon could express the local environment to make universal ideas relevant to local communities.
Dibble’s tabernacle at St Francis de Sales Church on Auckland’s North Shore has a relief image of Rangitoto Island on its side and its earthy bronze metal is more analogous to our landscape than the gold and silver more typically used in church altar objects. The Way of the Cross, painted by McCahon for the Upland Road convent, reflects the topography of Tā maki Makaurau Auckland and uses symbols rather than human figures to tell the story of the road to the Crucifixion.
The furniture my father designed was fashioned from rich kauri and heart rimu, and expressed the origin of its manufacture here in New Zealand. The materials, colours and iconography used by my father, McCahon and Dibble can be said to deify our own heritage and landscape.
It is intriguing that the Catholic Church gave these three men such latitude to decide how to design churches and make their artworks. I have not been able to find any written directives from the bishops in the Catholic archives but it does seem that while budgets were largely determined by the Catholic Diocese of Auckland, decisions about the build and adornment were made at a local level. Maybe Delargey and his colleagues were devolving these kinds of creative decisions to local communities in the spirit of Vatican II.
My father was a member of Group Architects, described by Julia Gatley as New Zealand’s most mythologised firm of midcentury architects, known for their calls for a specifically New Zealand architecture. In 1952, aged 26 and midway through his 10-year career with the Group, he applied for a government bursary to study French and work at an architectural practice in Paris. The main thing that impressed my father about France was the influence of art on architecture. He was particularly inspired by the windows in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, designed by the SwissFrench architect, painter, writer and sculptor Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.
My father returned to New Zealand in 1954, but it wasn’t until after he’d parted company with the Group in 1958 that he began his church work, the designs for which carried on the basics of the Group’s philosophy.
For McCahon, the church window work provided the context and structure to express his ideas on God, our lives, time and place. He saw the importance of making work for public places, and he went to enormous efforts to convey meaning as well as to fulfil the decorative purpose that he recognised as having been the job of church windows for centuries.
Christian symbols and ideas had been the subject of McCahon’s paintings since the 1940s. As well as studying the meaning and order of the signs and symbols he would employ for the church windows, McCahon also deliberated and enthused over how colours married, shed light and revealed themselves in the buildings. ‘‘Good glass holds your hands up high and a certain glory filters through your fingers,’’ he said.
These collaborative projects exist mainly in public buildings and yet are mostly experienced in a very private way. People who have gathered in chapels and churches to pray and worship have gazed at works by Dibble and McCahon over hours, days and years. They have become part of their own visual and spiritual vocabulary.
The communities who own these spaces have enriched what they started with. At St Francis de Sales Church, for example, a lovely small wooden cross has been carved by a parishioner to attach the key to the Dibble tabernacle. The churches that are still being used are cherished, and all the elements keep working together.