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Talk by John Bevan Ford for Exhibition Southern Lights
Williams Gallery, Petone 27 July 2003
(Based on a tape recording and some editing by Bruce Sampson.)
Note: words in brackets in italics were added by the ‘editor’ for clarification
I used to live in Epuni in the Waterloo area. In the mid 1940's, 1950's and so I know this place reasonably well. On a Sunday like this the family used to come down here either to Petone Beach or to some of the other beaches on the way around to Eastbourne and so forth. And at the time I had started my secondary schooling in Wellington and for a while I had to commute out of Waterloo Station, I think it was, and then take a tram to school. ............... Then when I had got past ........... School Certificate I was to change secondary schools and I went to Hutt Valley High School. Petone Tech. was the only other secondary school, I think, in this area at that time and so HVHS was the nearest.
I was lucky then that Jim Coe (art teacher at Hutt Valley High School) who went on and became the first person to deal with the Design School at the Polytechnic, which was created into one of the best design schools in the country. You may have heard of Julia Morrison an artist in New Zealand who had quite a considerable reputation overseas. She went to Wellington Polytechnic and then she went on to Canterbury University School of Art and she felt that her success and the best quality teaching that she had got had actually been the work of the Polytech. It was a great art school.
But in those days at that time I’m talking about, Jim was just the secondary school art teacher at Lower Hutt. It’s at that stage that it became obvious to me, that the scribbling and things that I did, could have a story to tell. You just didn’t paint horses and boats and aeroplanes and things like that. There was something else that you could do and you could chase ideas about in pictures. Anyway, time went on and I went all over the place, but I always remember with a great deal of good feelings the fact that I was here in those years and I was lucky enough to be at Hutt Valley High School. I think that was very important to me.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a floor talk, which means that I am on the floor, but the pictures are on the walls and .......... it might mean that we won’t be able to cover them all. But I’m not going to give you a history of me, I just want to ......go round the exhibition and give you a little bit of an introduction to each of the pictures. I notice that one or two folk were here last week and one or two of them had purchased paintings and they asked me stories about the paintings. But I have a hell of a job now, I’ve got to try and remember the same stories. The point I want to make about this is that stories are stories and paintings are paintings. I know of some painters and I’m thinking of Ralph Hotere in particular. You wouldn’t get him up here on the floor at all! There’s the painting - that’s it, that’s the story. Full stop, as far as he’s concerned.. Then there are people all the way down from that to all sorts of other artists. Visual arts are a language in themselves. They do come from human being’s ability to communicate and if you think of the human animal to start with, you know in its beginning stages, what enabled it to be a successful animal was (a) that it could work together with other human beings and (b) that it did that through forms of communication which eventually led to a very sophisticated form of speech that we are evolved in at the moment, which meant that Homo sapiens had a rather different jaw and tongue structure than other animals were allowed to have. We also developed a whole lot of other communication skills other than just verbal ones and of course sign language was one of them. So, this art business that we do is just part of the whole history of human communications.
In a way I agreed to be dragged into this business of talking about pictures because I see art as part of that whole process of communication. The problem is that the visual art forms, in particular, are able to stand aside from the person who created them and tell their own stories on their own two feet, whether the artist is around at the time or was around several thousand years ago . The work can still communicate and one of the interesting things about our visual art work is that although it was perhaps designed to tell of a particular state of mind and suggesting a certain philosophy or idea or something like that at one stage, it has the capacity to keep on telling stories for long afterwards, be it sculpture or painting or whatever it is. You have an abstract quality of communication that allows the product to communicate with people on afterwards and the interesting thing is that that communication seems to vary and alter and so it says different things to different people at different places at different times. I think that that is one of the reasons why we value the work so much, as it has this extra dimension to it. So although I can attempt to honestly stand in front of the work and explain different parts of it, I know darn well that in a couple of hundred years someone else will come up to it and see a whole raft of different things and be moved by it and motivated by it as I was when I first did it and the first audience did when they first saw it.
I started to interrupt myself in the middle of that because I remembered Gordon Tobie , who was my boss for many years in the art world, saying about trying to judge children’s work and mark it and so forth and said well what you’ve got to try and see is if the student, if the artist, has taken an idea and added something to it and carried the thought forward. Conversely, have you just accepted something, left it as it is, and then tried to call it a piece of art? The answer is no! First, you take it, manipulate it and carry it on further. Then the next thing is that you hope that the piece of work will sell or engage the viewer, so that it carries their thought on a little bit further. I think that’s some of the reason why the things that I am saying happen in art works happen! So that is a prelude - it’s taken me a hell of a long time to get through the prelude.
So while I am going to tell you some things about this (a) it’s not the only thing that’s in the work and (b) it doesn’t stop you from adding your own stories to it. I always hope that the work that I do, is even though it looks like a ‘realistic’, is abstract enough to leave room for you to weave your ideas into it. This group of works all belong to this year. I think that’s right.
A couple of years ago I was invited to be an artist in residence down in Queenstown. A lodge down there, which dealt mainly with people coming from overseas, had the idea that they would like their visitors to meet N.Z. artists who ...........(could be) accommodated in a rebuilt shepherd’s hut, quite stylish. So that the artists, if they wanted to, could live there, separate from the lodge. Have all your own space and time and then go into the studio and the visitors to the lodge could go up and see you at work in the studio, if that’s what they liked to do. Now I was approached to be the first person in this particular place and I agreed to do it. I’d just come back from making a sculpture in China, and during making it, I got a lot of sketches of trees in the area, that I needed to abstract, to put into the sculpture. If those sketches were still bubbling around and I’d liked to do something about them and make some paintings of them, not just sculptures, so I thought “going up to Queenstown that would be marvellous, sit there by myself, up in the mountains, with all the sketches and away I’d go”. So o.k. plans are one thing, but what really happens is another. So, I’m there doing that, but you can’t sketch with your eyes shut, so I’m looking around and these great mountains sort of kept resonating at you “our land” and you know those famous words “lands uplifted high” and they hit and crept into the work. The trees were there, but then the mountains came in behind them, then the mountains pushed past the trees and then “goodbye trees”. So once they were there they had to fit in to the way I thought and did things.
This is where my Maori heritage takes over. So let it be the mountains, you see. (Brief pause) “Where do you come from? What’s your whakapapa? What’s your genealogy?” And so I looked into the geology, the ancient geology of these mountains and thought of them when they were at the bottom of the sea bed and then when the great plates of the Pacific and the great Australasian plates and they rumbled together and pushed their knees up and twisted around and the glaciers came and I did a whole series (of pictures). At the end of the time I was taken on a trip down to the fiords, where of course these mountains leapt right up out of the sea and the mists come down and the sun shines through the mists and in the late evening then the sun sets. There are people around about everywhere and then in the morning it’s different again. Then you go down through the waters and the mountains lift up and reach out and the light bursts through - that whole group of three works there (illustrates this).
I had then two great images working on me, the mountains themselves and the light. Someone straight away said “Oh, John’s in his Turner period”. And it was right too because in the past I had not actually used light in my pictures, even when I was doing landscape looking things. This really had, you know, light underneath the pictures. I had space in my earlier works because that is a very important genealogical point in my works. Our genealogies go back past people into what in European terms is sometimes called God. Beyond that is abstract ideas of sky and space and light and dark. I’ve been particularly captivated by the concept of active space, because out of active space all sorts of imagery emerges, including Rangi and Papa and Tamanui Te Ra and so on and so forth. All kinds out of this area. So for many years I had allowed myself just to wander around in active space as it were. But I have not gone back a stage further into the area of light which had cut out the darkness and so forth and suddenly that group there had brought me into this particular era.
Last year I returned to Queenstown for another ‘belt’, as it were, and this time I was taken up into North Otago as well and saw some of the country there. I was inspired by its landscape, so I had a mixture then of mountains, of landscape, of light and things like that. Into all this, suddenly at one stage, came an e.mail from Beijing in China and just earlier, no, late last year, I’d been in Beijing to see the opening of an exhibition of sculpture that had one of my works in it. I hadn’t actually done it, I’d designed it and a Mexican friend of mine, whom I had met in China the year before, had drawn it out and supervised it and the Chinese stonemasons had made it and I only went along to clap. The Chinese are very great hosts and they look after you well, keep in touch with you afterwards, and so forth, and I got an e.mail from them concerned with the outbreak of SARS. They were in all sorts of strife over this. They thought it would be a lovely idea to hold an art exhibition in Beijing, from the international artists who had worked there before, that addressed the problem that they were facing with SARS. I was very keen to do a painting for this and that would be photographed and then made into an A4 copy and all the other works would then be used in an exhibition in Beijing .............Well, what was I going to do? So, I was thinking about this experience in North Otago, where you have these rock formations and then a tree and I thought it was wonderful that nature was renewing itself, you know, in the most adverse circumstances. So that was the bad start. Then I had the idea “Well, the nicest thing I could do was to give them a cloak....to remind them that in my language, ‘I value you, I value the effort that you have made into this terrible situation and here’s something to warm you physically and to warm you spiritually’ ”. So something I hadn’t done for 12 years suddenly emerged - the cloak again.
The cloak and the phoenix which is a sculptural form that I had done - it’s a form that in Chinese culture means regeneration. Phoenix appears in good times. I put the dragon in, which is for good luck and a few other things like that.O.k. I’d done the job and we sent the photograph - Anne put it on e.mail and sent it away. I returned to Te Anau and the fiords. It enabled me to say things about the fiords. That tremendous wild and beautiful area that I was made aware of by all the visitors down there. There was no doubt that in World terms this is a treasure and so the cloak was there to express the idea that this is a treasure. Each piece of landscape, as it were, has its own special cloak. I can just tell you this. I would have done the landscape first, then the cloak, with the cloak sometimes following the lines of the landscape and sometimes going against the lines of the landscape. “That movement against it there and that movement there”.........................That’s the sort of way I thought. “Or, here’s the sea going out here in this opening, so I put a big opening in the cloak- there.” Then there is usually further imagery in the work. In this case the two kotuku here - this is Te Anau, these ‘people’ (= birds) nest down the west coast down here, so the kotuku are returning to their nesting ground and up at the top of the cloak is a fish hook in the style of southern fish hooks. It’s to locate the area and also to put in an image that is a man-made object. I very rarely have figurative work in my pictures. Instead, I use things like birds for migration. I’m talking about migration of people really, not about birds at all. Sometimes, the birds are about the birds to some degree, like these two here going down to the west coast, but sometimes like this, it doesn’t really matter what (species) the birds were. They are moving about in just in the same way that people are moving about. As well as that, I use a fish hook here as well as there and there’s the takahe over there and the takahe and the eagle are done in the style of rock drawings. That’s because (a) the rock drawings are done in that area ...(b) So that the human element is in the work, even though ostensibly it’s a landscape. Then with this one, I got further carried away and actually put, as it were, a person in there, but it started off just as a cloak like that, rising up above the land. Somehow or other, I decided that it should have a person in it but it isn’t a particular person. It’s the idea of guardianship of the land and of the history of the land and it’s also claiming the land as ours. Now I don’t mean that in the political sense but rather in the nationalistic sense. All of these landscapes ..... “this is our land”.
To go back to that Queenstown experience, people come from miles and miles just to see these bits of land. They won’t see anything else like it unless they come here. It’s the point of view that I take, it’s the point of view about New Zealand art that I have. That our art is done the way that we do it. It ought to be done the way that we would do it. I’m not very keen on the idea of looking overseas toward the latest fashion that might be. I think that art right from the beginning has been about identity, because if I’m wearing this, whatever it might be, it shows that I have a particular role to play in society or have a particular skill whatever it might be - you know I am going back into the depths of time. If this person has got this particular type of cloak it’s because they are such and such. So it’s about identity. I don’t feel comfortable in taking the identity of someone in New York who has brought about all the things that are happening there - the important elements that are happening there and reflecting those. I don’t mind standing here in Petone and doing things about Petone and comparing them or looking at them (in relation to) something that’s happened in New York. I don’t mean that we should stand around with our eyes closed. But I shouldn’t be stylistically driven by what’s going on over there. So, not only in the way that I do the work, but also in the content of the work I feel that I would like to state things that are important to us here as we live it.
We’ve got some works that show the involvement of the mountains, only. Oh yes, and in those pictures there, are some birds that I should tell you a little bit about. After all my talk about identity and here in New Zealand amokura does not come from New Zealand at all. But they are very very important in New Zealand identity. They are the tropic bird. They come down about as far as the Kermadecs. They have a beautiful, beautiful, long plumed tail, with red or black at the bottom. When my ancestors first came to this country they wore feathers in their hair - the tail feathers of the amokura. In the Tainui stories, which I am descended from, we have a story of a gentleman called Taphini, who was the keeper of the chief’s feathers aboard the Tainui. When in late November, early December, the Tainui arrived off the coast of New Zealand....Taphini being a simple fellow who was only given the job looking after these feathers possibly because he wasn’t much good at doing anything else - ‘we don’t want all these feathers’ - away they went and away he went over(board) too! In around about 1860 the chief who came from Maungatautari near Cambridge in the Waikato (went) down to the Kapiti coast area here with Te Rauaparaha and settled down here and Te Hoihoi of Taupo sent a message to him to ask him to return to Maungatautari. He had a political reason for that. They were great friends and to have a very formidable chief looking after him on his northern border was very important. But he sent back and said “No, no Maungatautari is to me, like the lost kura of Taphini.” In other words, it’s been thrown away and I won’t be returning. This is hundreds and hundreds of years.
Although the bird did not come down here the mana of the bird and its feathers and the fact that we had to find a different type of effigy to show chieftainship was an important issue and the amokura was still remembered and now and then it turns up as a person’s name in the Tainui genealogy. So as a great treasure of the past - that’s the other thing that I perhaps should have mentioned in my work - I will pick up images and put them in, just to make a location with the past. So we know that the treasures which we see today have always been treasures, that have been treasured by other people before us and it’s up to us to carry that on and so that accounts for those particular birds.
So all that has tied the exhibition together then, as the name of it (“Southern Lights”), has been the flashes of light that are particularly seen in that group of three (pictures) there. Then when we look at all the others whatever they are, the light wells up through - either, it’s late evening light - or it’s early morning light - or it’s midday light. It has an important issue to do with the pictures, so just remember it’s not just light in the terms of Turner and the other painters, but it’s light in terms of genealogy.
It would be a good idea to ask you to ask me a few questions.
A question about the origin of the patterns in the pictures.
In the case of these works that I have here, and I just have to check up first of all, they are designs I have invented myself for the occasion. The other images are kaitahu images - the fish hooks and cave drawings. The type of patterns are usually based on old patterns, but not necessarily from the South Island. I have worked on South Island patterns, but it is a long, long time ago.I didn’t use them here. I just make up patterns that I felt appropriate for the piece of art work that I was doing.
A question from me about ‘the creature on top of the cloak there’ in the picture labelled ‘Hawk’.
Yes well it’s hawk. In each case, see, there is hawk down there,
thank’s Bruce, and that cloak there is being worn by hawk. That’s hawk there, there’s hawk there as well. There is a story behind hawk and the identity story behind hawk is Maui when he first comes into the picture. As a challenge to the culture, you know, he went down to Mahuika to find out where the fire had come from. It wasn’t good enough when she just pulled out one fingernail and said “whoosh” there’s fire. He put it out and came back. Sure it can’t be just that, but it was. Apparently he kept doing that until there were no fingernails left. ......So it went to toenails and he kept on with this, until the very last toenail was pulled out and instead of giving it to him, it was thrown in the forest and the forest caught fire and so he had to flee. He turned himself into a hawk to flee the fire. Then eventually the fire calmed down and a few sparks were left and he saw the sparks go into the timber and he learnt the art of rubbing the timber together again to find the sparks. So, it always has that meaning for me.
But it has another meaning too. When I started wandering out of New Zealand alongside other artists from other cultures - the particular friend I made was Rick Bartow in Oregon who was a North American Indian artist. Anne and I would go across there, usually about once a year and I’d work in his studio for a while. To get there we would go to Los Angeles, then up to Portland and Rick would drive up to Portland to pick us up and then take us down to South Beach where he lived down on the coast. A three hour trip. We would go along for three hours in the car “Hawk”, “Hawk”. Lanes and lanes of the stuff (cars) going in all directions and all Rick could see was “Hawk”. So I used to put it in paintings from time to time to remind myself of Rick. So here we have “Rick” and we also have got “Hawk”. In other words however naturalistic at times looking at the painting is, they aren’t natural, they are abstractions. Some are more abstractions than others. Thank’s Bruce for reminding me of that.
Question about a particular painting
Let me deal with the landscape first. This is a view from where I was working in Queenstown and the blue mountains - to the right hand side - are the Remarkables and then between them and the hills in the foreground there is Lake Wakatipu. Lake Wakatipu in history was the lair of the great Taniwha. I had that Taniwha there, leading along and I have done it in the style of a South Island cave drawing, you know, with that what we call manaia form - big form. The big wide mouth and circular eye. You don’t actually see Lake Wakatipu in that particular painting. The Taniwha stands for Lake Wakatipu and the energies of the place. So, it’s supposed to be a painting about the spiritual energy of the place.
Question from Lorraine Williams about the painting in the window which has attracted a lot of attention and comments from people coming into the gallery.
It starts in a fairly ordinary way - when you go into Doubtful Sound you come in from the top coming down the road and so you are looking down at the Sound. You can just about stand at certain points on the road and know the area that I am working from. I’ve put the mists - there is a general feeling of mists - hardly touching on showing the mists. In some of the paintings that I did mists were mists. (Here) There is just a sideways glance, as it were, at the concept of the mists. ........The figure there on the far hills is of course from the cave drawings. It is indicating the role of the people in the area without actually confronting it in a naturalistic way.
Question “a sociological sort of question” about how does he feel that in view of his Maori ancestry it seems that the sort of people who could afford his works would be mostly pakeha rather than Maori. How does he feel about that.
It’s difficult. An interesting fact is that recently perhaps the most expensive work that I have sold for a long time has gone to a Maori client. The other thing that I want to say in relation to that, is that I have always tried to keep the prices of my work down, so that people with wages rather than just salaries, could eventually afford a work. Not just out of their back pockets, by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps by trying hard they could and I think I have been able, in comparison with other artists with a similar sort of CV, to keep my prices down so that most folk can if they really want to can get the work. [John went on to comment that as far as most of his carvings were concerned he only did them in relation to a commission and it was a long time before he did them to sell rather than for a commission]. It’s an interesting question but I don’t think it has ever bothered me, because I’ve been part of Maori Artists and Writers Association for years and years and the Association was made possible because of the support of the Maori community. What it really came down to was that once a year we had a hui on a marae, somewhere in New Zealand, and all the local people went out of their way to support us. (There were) exhibitions there so you never had the feeling you were outside that cultural energy in any way......................................
[John added as a final humorous comment that he did not think Maori people found themselves deprived if they did not have access to his art “To start with, we had our own art galleries, fabulous art galleries called meeting houses”]
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