Exhibition Extras:

Slideshow (flash)

Hikurangi Swamp, 1916,
by Thomas Louden Drummond
WAM collection

Plumb Lines: A Survey of the Visual Landscape through the Surveyor's Lens

9 March - 21 June, 2009

‘When I speak of the land, the survey, the ploughman and such matters, the pencils of the reporters fly with the speed of the wind, but when I speak of the words of the spirit they say this is the dream of a madman’’
The prophet Te Whiti to reporters at Parihaka, June 1879

Every artist, of any generation choosing to portray aspects of our land within their creative ethos, views the landscape through a lens of their own timeframe and attitudes. Even a photograph is a constructed statement of interpretation – a selective process. The next exhibition at the art museum chooses the metaphor of the land surveyor’s theodolite, the first draughtsmen from the colonial era to document the New Zealand landscape though their intrepid art making.

Filling the museum gallery spaces for 15 weeks this exhibition will include an early 19th century Everest Theodolite c.1840 and a surveyors camp installation with instruments and ephemera from the pioneer period from which students and visitors will literally be able to view the exhibition – upside down!

A special highlight will be the loan of one of the most iconic images of Whangarei – the often reproduced Entrance to Whangarei Harbour 1871 by John Barr Clark Hoyte. On loan for the exhibition from the Hocken Library collection this famous painting will also be shown for the first time together with a twin watercolour of Whangarei by John Hoyte, Entrance to the Whangarei River from an Auckland private collection which has recently been bequeathed to the art museum. 

Drawing together substantial holdings of works from the art museum’s Heritage, Modernist and Contemporary collections for the exhibition spanning the period  from 1870’s to the present, and including the first paintings gifted to the Whangarei borough in 1923 by Capt. Gilbert Mair by Kate Sperrey (Mrs Mair 1862-93). Also including sculpture, photography, paintings and drawings by many well loved artists, including Margaret Stoddart and Adele Younghusband to contemporary works by Don Driver, Gretchen Albrecht, Jacquelyn Fraser and other key national artists such as Jeff Thompson and Tony de Lautour.

Previously, these earliest colonial cartographers, illustrators, surveyors and journeyman painters have had their artistic interpretation demeaned by judging it against the turgid weight of European art history clouding them. More than gifted amateurs, these pioneer artists in fact, brought a clarity, freshness and new field of vision to New Zealand’s burgeoning art history which influenced Angus and McCahon.

As a spiritual landscape, Northland has blessed tangata whenua and generations of settlers alike. For iwi in New Zealand the land is a living life-force; - taonga tuku iho. The people of this region have withstood many hardships and their strong sense of loyalty is in itself a response to the challenge to the land.
Truly resplendent lineages of New Zealand artists have re-visioned the landscape over succeeding generations. Over the past 200 years in New Zealand our documented art history has been predominantly a landscape tradition, recording the life and legacy of our changing landscape, our response to the land and challenges to the manner in which we inhabit it. Plumb Lines takes a sweeping scan through the theodolite’s lens of this rich visual history.

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