Artist statement

I was born of this land, the hills stretching out in fragmented passages like the sheets of an unmade bed, yet this land does not belong to me or to anyone for that matter. It has a timelessness that evokes the feeling of a pre-human existence – undulating limestone cliffs now clothed in the fabric of modern agriculture were once sub-aquatic gulfs inhabited by prehistoric sea creatures whose skeletal remains have literally formed the backbone of this terra.

Sun beats down from the impossibly blue sky, bleaching the land to a pale and shimmering gold; the hills roll on for miles only to be greeted by the great plains of Heretaunga where the moa once lived. I look to the east and the world seems to open up as the land meets the eternal ocean. I look to the west and let my gaze drift over the multi-faceted contours of the broken hills. My heart is racing; I can feel the ancient spirituality of this place, I can behold its tremendous beauty and I can taste the bounties of its people’s toil. From the most verdant greens of winter to the shimmering golds and ochres of the parched summer hills, the Hawke’s Bay region offers a veritable feast of seasonal colours and produce.

As an artist growing up in this landscape, I could not help but be influenced by its multiplicity, the harsh clarity of its light balanced by the velvety intensity of its shadows, the complex forms of the land broken up into more manageable areas of darkness and light. Somehow this becomes a metaphor for the feel of the place where my ancestors have so savagely felled the native bush only to leave the calm flowing forms of the naked landscape behind to fit our post-colonial interpretation of beauty.