Peter Atkinson - twelve months in the Pompallier Mission garden

Exhibition Wednesday 30th July - Saturday16th August
Artist talk at 3pm Saturday 2nd August

followed by a selection of French wine and good company

                      all welcome                             

The launch of Peter Atkinson’s third exhibition of still life paintings inspired by the Printery and Gardens of the Pompallier Mission will mark 10 years since his first visit to the site captured his imagination.

An initial 2016 exhibition focused on the austere beauty of the rammed earth building where, during the 1840s, Bishop Pompallier and his French Marist priests produced almost 40,000 religious books in te reo Māori.  Set in the subdued light of the upstairs printery, a series of still life paintings focused on the simple objects used by the guides who recount stories of the colourful characters and conflicts of Kororareka, during the tumultuous years that followed the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. 

Subsequent conversations with the Site Lead and gardeners, during a 2023 visit, sparked the idea of exploring connections between the mission building and the restored heritage gardens of the Greenway and Stevenson families, for whom the site was home during the later part of the 19th century, when extensive plantings in the late Victorian and Edwardian styles reflected their position in Bay of Islands society.

Over twelve monthly visits, Peter tracked the seasonal changes of the garden, taking small botanical elements into the building and allowing them to find places or objects with which they could be paired.  The twenty paintings that have emerged from the hundreds of photos with which he documented those visits, and the many months of slow patient work that followed, make up the exhibition, simply entitled 12 Months in the Pompallier Mission Garden.    

The fragment of an altar stone, retrieved from a corner of the garden during restoration, nestles against a tangle of bright nasturtiums.  The burnished, ruddy skins of heritage apples from the Greenway’s orchard echo the semiprecious stones set in an ornate brass reliquary that traveled from Lyon with the brothers of the Marist mission, while the bishop’s medicine cabinet is upstaged by Kawakawa leaves collected from the zig-zag hillside path above the site, laid out by the Stevensons in Edwardian picturesque style.    

The quiet contemplative quality of these finely finished works invites the viewer to pause; to slow down and to consider how, not just in curated historical sites but daily, we are surrounded by traces of the countless stories that have shaped our own.  Deep in the fabric of the landscapes and buildings we have inherited from those who have gone before us, they remain - in simple objects that bear the patina of use or reflect the aspirations of our forbears; among the humble plants whose seeds are spread throughout our gardens and in the trees whose roots go deep into the soil on which we stand and live.

Whatu ngarongaro te tangata, toitū te whenua. 

 People fade away, but the land remains.