The Imaginary Museum

Friday, July 13, 2012

Korero

Korero (12 July-2 August, 2012)

Korero is a "collaborative exhibition illustrating a fusion between visual art and poetry. 20 artists from various disciplines select from 20 carefully chosen poems on the theme of conversation, to use as inspiration for their artwork. The artists include Ingrid Anderson, Lisa Benson, Kirsty Black, Chris Dennis, Sue Dick, Matt Moriarty, Dom Morrison, Emily Pauling, Clinton Philips, Kirsten Pleitner, Ramon Robertson, Mark Russell, Kate Sellar, Brendon Sellar, Shona Tawhiao, Emma Topping, Wayne Trow, Jana Wood and Nicola Wright."

One of the poems chosen for the exhibition by Siobhan Harvey and Melissa Elliot, the curators, was my piece "Except Once":

– Aren’t I always nice to you?
– Except once.
[Overheard in the Massey @ Albany Refectory]

tap’s still dripping, diesel generators roar
in shop doors, no money rolls
in, lumps of old essay sag
in plastic bags – I type out texts
from Penguin Books of European Verse.
The water’s too cold
for swimming.

Focus on externals: tick of death
in Irene’s stomach, Miriel’s scorched flesh,
brain-clots and blood-diseases, Julian’s sister
killed on Saturday night – I like to see
the islands in the gulf, driving
down the long hill, ships floating
down the sky.

(17/3/98)

So, as a result, Bronwyn and I drove over to the Uxbridge Creative Arts Centre in Howick last night for the opening of the show. And I'm very glad we did. We got to catch up with a number of friends we hadn't seen for a while: Sarah Broom, Riemke Ensing and Sonja Yelich among them. And we also got to meet the artist who'd created a work based on my poem, Kirsty Black.

Here we are in front of her painting, also entitled "Except Once":

And here's a more detailed view of the painting itself:

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[Kirsty Black: Except Once]

[Except Once (detail)]

I guess I should explain that the poem was written during the great Auckland blackout of 1998, when "diesel generators" were indeed roaring "in shop doors" up and down Queen Street, and the only lights one could see in the darkened city were traffic red, orange, greens. It was a strange and uncanny time, and an appalling number of people I knew seemed to be in pain and turmoil just then. There's a bit of a lift at the end, though, which I feel that Kirsty has picked up on in her transition from the dark blue at the bottom of her painting to the lighter, more life-affirming colours at the top of the frame.

It was very interesting to discuss her intentions with the piece with her. All in all, though her painting didn't win the $1,000 prize, I think it was a thoroughly worthwhile experience. I guess that's why I'm looking so smug in the picture below:

Monday, July 09, 2012

Leicester Kyle in the NZ Geographic

[NZ Geographic 116 (2012)]

I had an interesting phone conversation a couple of months ago with journalist Kennedy Warne, who was working on an article about the implications of further strip-mining of coal on the West Coast of the South Island. He'd just come across my Leicester Kyle website, and was fascinated - above all - by Leicester's lyrical sequence of protest poems The Great Buller Coal Plateaux (2001).

I'm happy to see that he's included a number of citations from Leicester in the article which has just appeared in the latest issue of New Zealand Geographic, which he was kind enough to send me a copy of (nor is it true that the hirsute creature in the picture above is intended as any kind of satirical reflection on Leicester's own magnificent set of silver whiskers ...). Here's one example, from the beginning of "The Black and the Green":

... Thin, cold, acidic soils and scant nutrients stunt growth. On the Denniston Plateau, life adopts a low profile.

You might expect such a place to have a pinched austerity about it — sour, waterlogged, battered by the elements, a po-faced bog. Yet the land surges with beauty. I walk across it and discover what the late poet Leicester Kyle, from Millerton, just north of here, called an "untrod field of singing flowers". Sprays of pink, insect-devouring sundews mingle with swards of tufting mosses. Each sprigleaf hair is tipped with a single droplet of dew. Crouching at ground level, I gaze across a field of sparkling globes. ...

I thoroughly recommend reading Kennedy Warne's article as a whole. I have to say that it horrified me to discover just how little of the pakihi land Leicester and others were struggling to save a decade ago is left now. The Millerton Plateau is, it seems, pretty much a done deal. The struggle now is to learn from that lesson, and try to avoid the same ecological devastation on the Denniston plateau, a bit further south.

[Forest & Bird]

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Jack & Bronwyn's Dunedin Adventure

The view from my brother Jim's window
(Opoho, North East Valley, Dunedin)

I've just spent five days in Dunedin, attending the launch (on Tuesday 19th June) of the MOTH [Museum of True History] show "Fallen Empire" at the Blue Oyster Gallery.

We had a really nice time! The weather was practically perfect (despite various naysaying weather prophets). We hung out with my brother Jim; my niece Catherine; Karl Chitham, whose collection the exhibition came from (I edited the catalogue, and wrote an introduction to it); and also David Howard, my fellow executor of Leicester Kyle's literary estate, from whom I collected the remainder of Leicester's papers.

Here are some pictures - mostly taken by Bronwyn, hence her absence from them, but also a few by David Howard (marked DH), as well as some by my brother Jim (marked JR):