Exhibition Wednesday 30th July - Saturday16th August
Artist talk 3pm Saturday, 2nd August
The launch of this third exhibition of still-life paintings inspired by the Printery and Gardens of the Pompallier Mission marks 10 years since my first visit to the site, which captured my imagination.
An initial 2016 exhibition focused on the austere beauty of the rammed earth building where, during the 1840’s, Bishop Pompallier and his French Marist priests produced almost 40,000 religious books in te reo Māori and the simple objects used by 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.
Here the special quality of light that reflects off the bay and filters through the mullioned windows before skimming across hand rendered walls reaches its apotheosis - building with quiet intensity, from a corner deep in shadow, to illuminate a collection of objects and props guides use to demonstrate the final steps of stitching, binding and gluing the covers on texts that fed a growing hunger for literacy amongst Maori.
Subsequent conversations with the Site Lead and gardeners, during 2021, 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 and into the early 20th century. Entrusted with a pair of secateurs from the gardeners shed, I was given permission to wander the grounds whose extensive plantings in late Victorian and Edwardian fashion had reflected their owners’ position in colonial society.
Twelve monthly visits enabled me to track the seasonal changes of the garden. Responding to what every captured my attention, small botanical elements found their way to this upstairs corner that, in between guided tour groups, served as the stage on which they and other objects in the building could engage in quiet conversation.
While aware of a recent and contemporary approaches to garden painting in New Zealand, I wanted to situate this project more in the tradition of still life realism where my work seems to have landed. However, unlike the floral still life paintings of the Flemish Golden age, that often condense a whole year of horticultural specimens into an encyclopaedic display, outside of space and time, the careful observation of detail to which I am drawn aims to represent a series of specific moments in the life of particular plants, in all their fragility and transience.
A paradoxical relationship to time, inherent in Realist Still Life, is embedded in these paintings. They are an invitation to come closer, to pause, and to go deeper into the mystery of the everyday wonders all around us that emerge and fade out of a different way of being in time. It is an invtation to slow down; 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.
Peter Atkinson 2025
