With an Irish mother and a Tongan father, much of the dynamic tension in Wolfgramm’s work stems from the conflicting cultures that form his ancestry and continue to influence his daily life. He considers himself “an ordinary Kiwi” within a changing New Zealand ethnographic landscape, where the Pacific is not only where we ‘are’ but increasingly where we are ‘from’.
His monumental new painting, featured in this exhibition and simply called ‘Site’, offers us a grand view of our present, or maybe our future, as if Wolfgramm is telling us to ‘come here, palangi’: come and see who we are. Broad black lines scythe their way up and down the canvas as if replicating the slashing hands of cane cutters; more lines crisscross horizontally like a complex mat of woven motorways. In between all this are the delicately drawn marks of Wolfgramm’s continually evolving set of personal motifs, intricate and detailed, entirely enigmatic but perhaps referencing tapa, tattoo, carving, birds, lines, sinkers or churches.
This is a hymn to the Pacific, a song for Auckland, a massed choir lifting its voice above the streets and into the sky above the Pacific’s largest Polynesian city.
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