Ocean crossings form bonds
After wining a laureate award, Robin White tells Dionne Christian how she remade her art
It was 1996 and artist Robin White, one of our best- known painters and printmakers, stood in front of her family home in Kiribati faced with utter destruction.
The open- plan mwenga she and her family — husband Michael Fudakowski and their three children, Michael, Conrad and Florence — lived in had been razed by fire leaving her with the clothes she wore and the suitcase she brought from New Zealand.
The family had lived on the island of Tarawa in Kiribati since 1981. Devoted members of the Baha’i community, they had come to support those in Kiribati but, says White, had to be selfsupporting. “It was a change of address but business as usual.”
Well- established in New Zealand, White had a reputation for — to quote art historian Jill Trevelyan — painting local landscapes “using crisp, rhythmic outlines, strong light and flat blocks of colours”. Paintings like Mangaweka, Florence and Harbour Cone, Fish and Chips,
Maketu, A Buzzy Bee for Siulolovao and This is me at Kaitangata captured a snapshot of rural NZ life with a slightly surreal edge.
On Kiribati saw White swapped oil on canvas for woodblock printmaking and depicted scenes from island life starting with the series The
Beginners Guide to Gilbertese, a nod toward Kiribati’s English name, the Gilbert Islands.
The fire meant bigger changes. “There were no supplies of the art materials I was used to working with, so I was making semi- regular trips back to New Zealand or Australia, linking it with exhibitions that I was having and stocking up on materials at the same time,” White explains.
“Because I didn’t have my studio any more, I had to completely re- think my art practice and that led to the rather obvious decision to collaborate with local women using materials available locally and working with women who had the skills I didn’t.” Was it difficult, at 50, to almost begin again? “Not at all; in that sort of situation, what else do you do? It was fantastic and a really good example of the interconnectedness of calamity and providence. It was one of those classic situations where a difficult situation requires you to think outside the box and that engenders a sort of creative way of thinking that you might not engage in otherwise.”
She learned more about tapa and masi ( bark cloth), making natural dyes and incorporating Pacific designs, myths and legends into her art. To hear White describe the detailed and lengthy process by which cloth is made is to be left admiring the ingenuity of those who puzzled all this out initially and the patience of those who continue to keep traditional art forms alive.
It is a creative way of thinking that continued to win White accolades and devoted followers. In 2003, she was made a Distinguished Companion of the NZ Order of Merit; in 2011, she was selected for the Pew Environment Group’s Global Ocean Legacy artists’ voyage to the Kermadec Islands and, a year later, received a University of Auckland Distinguished Alumni Award.
Now she is one of five artists to receive a coveted Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation.
She will put the $ 50,000 toward travel to work on the kinds of collaborative projects that have occupied much of her time since 1996. Though she returned to NZ, and now lives in
Masterton, in 1999, White has continued working collaboratively with women around the Pacific thanks, in part, to being appointed to a Baha’i institution which works around the Pacific. Siu I Moana: Reaching across the
ocean, made with Tongan artist Ruha Fifita, after the Kermadec “adventure” and work trips to Tonga is perhaps the best known work. Now part of the University of Auckland’s art collection, it depicts migratory pathways and the fundamental role the sea, reciprocity and exchange play in the Pacific.
“I think of New Zealand as a Pacific Island nation; we’re in the Pacific and everyone who has come to this country has had to cross the ocean to come here,” says White. “I think the connection with the Pacific is something to celebrate and that’s what Ruha and I did with our first work together.
“It was an opportunity to celebrate reciprocity and exchange which is very much part of Pacific Island life and has been for centuries. The ocean is a highway, it’s what connects us and it’s not a barrier; it’s our pathway to each other and to the rest of the world.”
Her latest works, made with Tamari Cabeikanacea, are masi ( Fijian bark cloth) and feature intimate domestic scenes.
White returns to Fiji next month to make work for the bicentenary of the birth of Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i faith. Her exhibition Something is happening
here closes at Two Rooms Gallery today.