2023 – “All-at-Once-ness” – solo Homestead Galleries, Corbans Art Estate, Tāmaki Makaurau

2023, Paintings

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2.26.2023

All-at-once-ness is an exhibition of works arising from an ongoing fascination with Colin McCahon’s vividly coloured and little-known 1971 series of works on paper, produced shortly after his move from Tāmaki Makaurau to work from his studio at Muriwai.

This project-turned-exhibition began several years ago, prompted by an encounter with two of McCahon’s 1971 works on paper—A Poem of Kaipara Flat and Evening Muriwai—at Pah Homestead in Tāmaki Auckland. That encounter marked the genesis of a journey. As the pandemic took hold, I relocated to Port Waikato, further south along the west coast from Muriwai, where McCahon’s paintings continued to shape and inform my creative research.

In the development of All-at-once-ness, I sustained a deep immersion in, and connection to, place. Using light layers of oil paint on traditional rabbit-skin gesso, my focus shifted away from isolated “views” toward the complex weave of daily phenomena that surrounded me. The perpetual cycles of accumulating and receding sands, the movement of the sky’s currents, the restless undulation of the sea, and the commanding presence of the Waikato Awa come to the fore.

And with this attention comes a warning: rising sea levels and ongoing, damaging erosion.

Visual and written research on the colonial grid, initially undertaken while at Elam, was critically extended over time in response to the specific histories and conditions of the Port Waikato landscape. Hard-edged, bolted-on framing devices operate as a soft metaphor for the confiscation of land and the widespread destruction of native forests to make way for heavily farmed paddocks during colonisation. These frames reference the colonial grid—the imposed framing of land and view—and its enduring impact on the whenua, the awa, and its people.

Nina Dyer, Art Curator and critic, wrote…

“As a series, All-at-once-ness is a testament to the notion of artist as conduit, channelling sense information, history and embodied knowledge from their surroundings and filtering it though the alchemical business of form and texture”

Read Nina Dyer’s essay on All-at-once-ness here.