Exhibitions Dunedin

JOHN CASELBERG

PATRICIA FRANCE Watercolours RALPH HOTERE 'Malady' panels

The work of two very different painters can rarely have been shown together more happily than in the Bosshard Galleries' June exhibition of paintings by Patricia France and Ralph Hotere.

In fifteen small paintings, with warm watercolour lovingly applied, Patricia France brings to life scenes from a colonial childhood which few New Zealanders have previously depicted. Set earlier this century, either in Nelson - against a background of Nelson's uniquely-gentle hills, and its similarly gentle if circumscribing sea - or in Canterbury, Otago or Australia, Patricia France's people invariably appear outdoors, revelling in the sunlight which strikes them so much more vividly than it had 'at home', in England.

Although superficially they are charming, with flower-like colours suffusing each painting, anxieties and mysteries lurk here behind childhood's apparently ingenuous perception of a marvellous clear new world. The painter herself lived for several years in Paris. Back in the New Zealand where she grew up, she has been able to portray aspects of a colonial society which Henry James would immediately have recognised. Certain questions sound from these pictures. 'What country is it that these gaily-dressed Europeans have stumbled into?' 'On what stage of hills and shore, under what sky, are they acting out the dramas of their uprooted, castaway, timorously-decorous lives?' 'Will the social conventions they exhibit which hitherto have bound and protected them in their communities, take root here and flourish? Or, like Herrick's flowers, must they fade soon from an alien territory?'

Statements almost of reply ring from Ralph Hotere's eight 'Malady' panels, which are hung together as one work on an opposing wall of the gallery.

Dark as a moonless night irradiated by but few stars, these large-scale black paintings are inscribed with the text of a poem by Bill Manhire. The poem is written as a verbal - and, as it appears printed, typographical - conceit upon the words 'malady', 'melody', and 'my lady'.

Each panel bears a thin-lined bright-coloured circle, hanging either in sombre space, or above an horizon of the earth dimly gleaming below. What is the subject here but an expression of the state of soul of the land which the colonials have rashly entered? These colonials, we recall, and their descendants, have denied generations of this painter's people the right to grow up speaking their own language in the schools they were forced to attend. 'Malady' says the poem. This is a cause for pain, this malady hurting both Maori and European. The coloured circles flow together and knock and chime: making 'melody'; echoing, it seems, the vibrations of bird-feather decorated and greenstone heirlooms glowing yet out of a still extant past; and bell-pealing too with the sounds of today; reminding us, as James Baldwin has written, that:
'here we are, at the centre of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable and most improbable water-wheel the world has ever seen. . . If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our own country, and change the history of the world. If we do not. . . the fulfilment of that prophecy is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.'

At the base of the last panel, the land emerges shining more strongly out of the darkness. Is not this a vision of 'our country', Papatu-a-nuku, the earth-stretched-out-far, the Earth Mother, 'my lady'?