The Meaning of New Zealand Landscape: Past, Present and Future
/By Sarah McClintock, Curator, The Suter Art Gallery Te Āratoi o Whakatū
‘Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place. For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal.’
— John Berger, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, 1967
In Priscilla Pitts’ essay ‘The Unquiet Earth: Reading landscape and the land in New Zealand art’, she refers to the landscape as a contested space, ‘an occupied zone whose constantly reread and rewritten histories do not lie in quiescent layers but jostle, shift, and thrust, as changing and unstable as the land itself.’1 Landscape painting in Aotearoa has been understood as having a role in shaping and reshaping our understanding of nationhood and national identity.
In the nineteenth century it was a tool for propaganda — selling the vision of New Zealand as an agrarian utopia for colonialists. Fantasies around identity and colonial expansion became inextricably linked with the land during this period.2 As ideas of nationhood were expanded and questioned through the two world wars, there grew a desire to understand the social, cultural and aesthetic qualities that make this country unique. The land once again became the focus for this search for identity.
The quest for and understanding of national identity through landscape is not unique to Aotearoa; it is something which connects many Western cultures.3 New Zealand’s landscape did not see the physical trauma that occurred in Britain, Europe, the Middle East or Asia during the world wars — we did not have cities levelled and buildings scarred — but the psychological impacts of this time were universal. For some, the geology and geography of the land was a comfort — structures could be destroyed but the earth remained. But others, as expressed through the rise of Modernist art, saw the landscape and its role as a metaphor for national identity as fragile in the face of globalisation.4 The land therefore became a site of anxiety in the middle of the twentieth century.
In New Zealand the search for a quintessentially ‘New Zealand art’ found its expression in the Regionalist landscape paintings of The Group in the 1930s. By ‘New Zealand art’ they implicitly meant Pākehā art, born from the Western aesthetic tradition, which was focused almost exclusively on the hard, flat light of this country and the way in which it carved out the forms of the landscape. But soon, with the rise of Modernism and the writing of the history of New Zealand art, the artist’s relationship with the landscape began to shift. It is in this climate that the Kelliher Art Competition was born.
31. Caroline Bellamy Light in the valley, Lawrence River 2019
The first winner of the Kelliher was Leonard Mitchell, with his work Summer in the Mokauiti Valley (1) in 1956. In this lush painting we see farms and fences bisecting the land, trees have been felled and two sheep happily graze in the foreground. It is the perfect representation of a productive, welcoming and pure landscape. Established to encourage not only the development of high-quality art but also the appreciation of the unique landscape of this country, the Kelliher Art Competition, and the collection that was created from it, championed ‘traditional’ landscape painting. However, the scope of the work that has since been added to the Kelliher Art Trust collection is surprisingly and refreshingly broad. For a competition long associated with tradition, the later works are in no way academic. The collection ranges from the hyper-realist work of Rosanne Croucher to the structured strokes of Caroline Bellamy, the flattened forms of Michael Smither and the shadowed view in Richard McWhannell’s Zephyr through Toetoe (23). The stylistic expressions of the land are expansive; what binds them together is their commitment to representation — holding on to the identifiable characteristics of place.
It is this allegiance to representation that brought the most criticism to the competition. In the context of the Kelliher Art Competition, the landscape could not be abstracted, and critics argued that this kind of rejection of Modernism was a denial of progress. With the writing of New Zealand’s art history, which began in earnest in the 1960s, any art form which embraced tradition was deemed regressive. If it did not add to the progression of art towards Modernism it was going to fall prey to ‘repetition or diminution’.5 The paintings that were created for the Kelliher Art Competition were not avant-garde. They often went against what the art world considered exciting or cutting edge, yet the competition has become an important record of a time and place — a time capsule that captured our shifting relationship with art and the land.
To the modern eye the works remain approachable for the general art-viewing public, and feed into the same nostalgia that inspired the painting of many of them. Standing in front of these works does not make a viewer uncomfortable — they feel like memories of summer days, adventure, hard work and restful calm. They do not challenge or conceal their meaning through abstraction, concept or materiality. But this does not mean that they are devoid of ideology and that there is nothing to be learned from examining them.
Through these paintings we see the important distinction between landscape and nature. Few images from the early years of the competition are devoid of humanity; instead, they bustle with activity, or the promise of it. Boats are moored ready to launch in Douglas Badcock’s Boat Harbour, Nugget Point (2), figures gleefully frolic in the braided river of Peter McIntyre’s The Manuherikia, Central Otago (4), and in Colin Wheeler’s Cattle Muster, Lake Hawea (15) we see two horsemen at work moving stock with a storm coming. In this way we see landscape painting as being a representation of nature filtered through culture. Nature is understood through its relationship with humans; we see it in terms of our harnessing of it as a resource as well as a backdrop against which our lives play out.6 But that is about us, not the land, which existed long before us and will go on after we are gone. As Toss Woollaston wrote in 1960, ‘The landscape, too, is inert, and knows nothing of what we think of it and do with it when we paint. The picture is entirely a building we make for our imagination to dwell in.’7
23. Richard McWhannell Zephyr through Toetoe 2005
The land is heavily gendered in many cultures. In the Māori creation myth the land is Papatūānuku, the earth mother, from which all life sprang in the aftermath of her separation from her husband Ranginui, the sky father. The ‘earth mother’ story is common across many cultures — from ancient Greek mythology to Algonquian legend. Fertile and nurturing, the earth has been long associated with femininity. In Western history it was men’s responsibility to conquer the land and to make it productive.
Within this cultural context, depictions of the land are also highly gendered. The history of art, and the history of the Kelliher Art Competition, reflects this gendering. The vast majority of the winners and finalists of the competition were Pākehā men. After the competition ceased, the Kelliher Art Trust maintained its commitment to supporting landscape painters and began purchasing and commissioning landscape paintings, and in this era they have been able to focus their collecting on adding more work by women and Māori artists.
Aroha Gossage’s dreamlike Hauturu (29) presents a vision of Aotearoa as untouched. The island it represents sits in the Hauraki Gulf (the kaitiaki of Te Hauturu-o-Toi are Ngāti Manuhiri) and has been a wildlife sanctuary since 1897. It is understood to be our ‘most intact, undisturbed ecosystem’8, and as such its importance is in opposition to the colonial reading of the land — which asserts that the value of the land resides in its relationship with humanity. It is instead a critically important place because of the exact opposite; access to it is strictly controlled, to protect it from any harm. We see in Gossage’s painting, and through her perspective as both a woman and tangata whenua, that the land is not ours to own, and that its value is intrinsic and not dependent on our occupation of it. It exists through a series of complex and equally important relationships with animals, trees and water, as well as with people.
In looking at the competition, the Kelliher Art Trust and its continued collecting, we must ask what is the future for representational landscape painting? Our understanding of the toxic relationship humanity has created with the land has solidified with the worsening climate crisis. Fires are destroying forests, rising sea-levels are eroding coastlines, and mining has collapsed mountains. Paintings of these landscapes have become archives of loss; in fact, climate scientists have been using the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and other artists to examine the levels of pollution in nineteenth-century Europe. Their shifting shades of pink, purples and greens, and red sunsets, have been studied and interpreted to reveal important data about the changes in the environment created by the advent of industrialisation.9
The climate crisis is, and will continue to be, more than simply a topic for contemporary art to address; ‘it is a historical condition that informs all contemporary art.’10 Landscape painting can occupy a space that highlights the fragility of the natural world and our impact on it, but it can be more. It has the ability, in this new paradigm in which the land has become a centralised point of hope and anxiety, to give us insight into what has led us to this place, and act as a visceral reminder of ways in which we rely on the land to nurture us and shape our understanding of ourselves.
This essay was originally published by The Kelliher Art Trust and included in their exhibition publication for “Rare and Unrivalled Beauty: Landscape Paintings from The Kelliher Art Trust Collection’.
Priscilla Pitts, ‘The Unquiet Earth: Reading landscape and the land in New Zealand art’ in Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1992, p. 87.
Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 184–85.
For an example of this, see Catherine Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain, Routledge, 2009.
Tim Barringer, ‘Landscape Then and Now’, British Art Studies, Issue 10, 2018 https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/tbarringer (accessed 11 June 2021).
Francis Pound, The Invention of New Zealand: Art & National Identity 1930–1970, Auckland University Press, 2009, p. 119.
William S. Smith, ‘Climate Changes Everything’, Art in America, May 2020, pp. 28–33,
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/climate-change-contemporary-art-1202685626/ (accessed 10 June 2021).
Toss Woollaston, The Far-Away Hills: a meditation on New Zealand landscape, Auckland Gallery Associates, p.43.
Te Hauturu-o-Toi/Little Barrier Island, https://www.tiakitamakimakaurau.nz/discover-tamaki-makaurau/learn-about-your-area/bfa-te-hauturu-o-toi/ (accessed 24 June 2021).
Diego Arguedas Ortiz, ‘The climate change clues hidden in art history’, BBC Culture, 28 May 2020, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200528-the-climate-change-clues-hidden-in-art-history (accessed 11 June 2021).
Smith, ‘Climate Changes Everything’.
Exhibition Itinerary
Millennium Public Art Gallery, Blenheim, 11 December 2021 - 13 February 2022||
Suter Art Gallery Te Āratoi O Whakatū, Nelson, 5 March - 22 May 2022
Lakes District Museum & Gallery, Arrowtown, 3 June - 17 July 2022
Ashburton Art Gallery, Ashburton, 9 August - 2 October 2022
Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, 29 October - 22 January 2023
Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru, early 2023
