Look Inside: Robin White by Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga

S A R A H FA R R A R — J I L L T R E V E LYA N — N I N A TO N GA

ROBIN WHITE

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE

Detail from: Robin White Fish and Chips, Maketu (1975)

Foreword

Notes

Introduction

Exhibition History

Part 01 My father had ambitions for me

Bibliography

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11

15

259

268

273

Glossary 279

Paremata 43

Contributors 281

Part 02 The work must go on 61

Ōtepoti Dunedin 75

Part 03 Village life throws you into the midst of everything 127

Kiribati 143

Part 04 An act of faith 193

Whakaoriori Masterton 209

Collaborating Artists 284

Acknowledgements 287

Index of Illustrations 289

Image Credits 293

Index 295

Robin White on the Otago Peninsula, c.1972. Hereweka Harbour Cone is in the distance.

THE WORK MUST GO ON

02

ROBIN WHITE

Robin White wasted no time getting established in Dunedin.

On her first day she went for a drive to explore Otago Peninsula and saw a run-down cottage for sale. Next day she met the agent and arranged for a builder to assess the dry rot, and later in the week her offer was accepted. Her first home cost $1500, of which she had saved $500. She borrowed the remainder from her parents and paid them back at $8 per week.

From her tiny cottage in Lower Portobello, White looked out over Harington Point Road to the harbour. Her view also took in the hills of the peninsula, and she began to make drawings immediately, just as she had in Paremata. Sky, Land and Sea, painted in March 1972, three months after her arrival, shows two stacked views of the hills, looking towards Portobello.1 For White this work represented a ‘breakthrough moment’, when she attained a new level of skill in watercolour and sensed the potential in her subject.2 In her first year in Dunedin, she spent hours ‘learning’ the landscape of Otago Peninsula, and in particular the stately peak of Hereweka Harbour Cone, which formed one of its highest points. The process was physical and intellectual: ‘I walked it. I climbed it, drew it – I saw it every day.’3 In the following years Hereweka would come to have ‘a sort of spiritual significance’ for White, appearing in at least sixteen paintings, prints and drawings.4 Socially she found Dunedin very welcoming, and she met local luminaries such as the poets Charles Brasch and Hone Tūwhare, and the artists Ralph Hotere, Jeffrey Harris and Joanna Margaret Paul. The painter Anna Caselberg and her husband, the writer John Caselberg, also became friends.

‘The Brasch fraternity looked after me,’ White notes. ‘They invited me to dinners, exhibitions and events – there was a community of artists and they were very supportive.’5 White became involved with local iwi at Ōtākou Marae, not far from her cottage, and the Otago University Māori Club, which welcomed anyone with an interest in te ao Māori. A new friend, Tahana Waipouri, told her about Mataatua whare whakairo at the Otago Museum, created by her Ngāti Awa ancestors – ‘That’s your taonga’ – and she made the first of many visits to sit in its presence and study its carvings and tukutuku panels.6 This was the decade when White was most closely associated with the Māori art world. She joined Ngā Puna

1

1. Robin White, Sky, Land and Sea (1972), watercolour, 600 × 445 mm

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PART T WO

2

Waihanga, the national organisation of artists and writers which played a key role in the Māori renaissance of the period, and sent work for display at its first hui at Te Kaha in 1973.7 Later she attended hui at Taihoa Marae in Wairoa in 1974, where she gave a screenprinting workshop, and Taurua Marae at Rotoiti in 1976. ‘It was exciting,’ she recalls, ‘I enjoyed the hanging out, the informality, the discussion with other artists and writers.’8 Through friends in the Bahá’í community White met her future husband, Michael Fudakowski. A student of English and contemporary literature at the University of Otago, he had spent the summer of 1971–72 in Auckland, staying on for the Led Zeppelin concert at Western Springs stadium. By the time he returned, in March, White was well established in Dunedin, and a mutual friend drove him out to meet her.

of my image as a serious artist, I didn’t want to come across as a giddy, lovestruck girl. But what anchored our relationship from the start was the fact that we shared the same spiritual values and commitment. They were married at the Bahá’í Centre in Parnell, Auckland, on 11 November 1972, with White wearing the first dress she had ever purchased, a handprinted cotton by Christchurch designer Fanny Buss.

Previously White’s tiny cottage had been dominated by her studio, which occupied the living room, but once Michael moved in it was clear that they needed more space, and she rented a nearby bach as a workroom until they could build an extension.

The need for a studio was more essential than ever, as she had given up a part-time teaching position at St Dominic’s College and 1973 would be her first year as a full-time painter – a milestone in her career. She had been encouraged by the ‘amazing success’ of her exhibition at Maureen Hitchings’ Dawson’s Gallery in August 1972, where she sold all but two of the twenty-seven works on show.10 White had a productive start to 1973, planning new prints and developing paintings such as Mangaweka, Concrete Angel, Rata and Fortress House, Paremata (pages 105, 83, 107) for an exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries in August.11 But there was more news, as she told Peter McLeavey in the autumn:

So this car pulls up, and this guy appears with a bunch of flowers. What impressed me were his long legs. And he was very handsome. And he comes up the path and he hands me the flowers . . . my heart melts. Later I found out a Bahá’í lady had given him the flowers to give to me – I should have known right from the start!9 The relationship gradually blossomed. ‘Mike wasn’t a pushover,’ White recalls. ‘And I was cautious. I was protective

2. Robin White, second from right, with Miki Wairoa, Hawea Grant and Leslie Boyles at an arts workshop at Taihoa Marae, Wairoa, during the 1974 Maori Artists and Writers’ hui. Photograph by John Miller.

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ŌTE DUN

POTI EDIN

ROBIN WHITE

Hereweka Bridget Reweti

The back door of the Caselberg cottage in Whakaohorahi has a lead-light, east-facing window depicting Hereweka.

The leaves used to dance in the morning light that came through the glass. I imagined that behind the window, a little bit south, was the real deal. A big cone shape of a hill that Robin White painted so often, overlooking Ōtākou and Muaupoko.

When I stayed at the cottage the wind was so strong a tree blew over in the front yard. The next morning, the kitchen was very bright and Janet and Lesley from the Caselberg Trust were already there in chaps, hard hats and earmuffs chainsawing the tree. I had to quickly get out of my pyjamas, pretending I’d been up for hours, and help them bring the chipper up the steps. Vivian from up the road popped in to help, then lost her glasses and we spent a long time trying to find them among the leaves and sawdust. Dad worked at a sawmill for thirty years and I like that smell.

Dad’s wallet got stolen by a weka once. I’m a bit foggy on the details, because (as with lots of family stories) I wasn’t actually there. But again like family stories, it’s my prerogative to tell it if I want to. He had driven up a long gravel road next to a tannin-stained river on Te Tai Poutini to pick my sister and her partner up from a canoe trip. They returned home and he had no wallet. My brother-in-law and Dad had to drive all the way back the next day and scrounge around in the bush near the car park. Sure enough, there was his wallet, discarded by the weka.

A week before his hura kōhatu, my sister and I met up to go camping around Tōtaranui. I love camping because I get to eat processed food like packet cheesy pasta without judgement. A weka stole my Continental Sour Cream & Chives value-pack. I ran after it through the bush in my bare feet; a prickly chase in slow motion. I clapped and shouted ‘yah yah’ until the weka finally dropped it and I wandered back to our campsite to enjoy my fake cheese meal.

Maybe back in the day I would have been waiting, silently, to snare that weka. I imagine they taste like chicken, mostly because they seem so domestic, unafraid of humans and inquisitive like hens. Perhaps when the revolution comes and Māori have full sovereignty over our lands and waters and ngā taonga katoa we can start snaring, eating and using their oil to heal our wounds again. Like the name Hereweka seems to suggest.

Dad preferred seabirds, though. Skylark by Witi Ihimaera was one of his favourite books. One time after he had just parked at the beach, a seagull dropped a mussel on the concrete in front of us, trying to crack it open. Dad scooped up the opened mussel and ate it. ‘Yeeyaah seagull!’ he said. It was the early 2000s and people said ‘yeeyaah’ a lot.

If he ever got his hands on some tītī, Dad was relegated to cooking outside. Tītī used to hang around Mōtītī, the island off Tauranga Moana, but he had to order a white bucket through a cousin’s friend’s cousin from the kaitiaki of the Tītī Islands. Talk about food sovereignty.

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ŌTEPOTI DUNEDIN

Harbour Cone (1972) oil on canvas 1015 × 1015 mm Dunedin Public Art Gallery, purchased with funds from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society, the Dunedin City Council, the Sargood Bequest, the Otago Community Trust, the Alexander McMillan Trust, the Emily and Charles Merrie Bequest and Kay and Alan Gray 77

ROBIN WHITE

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WHAKAORIORI MASTERTON

Robin White, Tamari Cabeikanacea and Ruha Fifita Something is happening here: Living in a material world (2017) barkcloth, earth pigments, natural dye 2190 × 3380 mm Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased 2018 241

ROBIN WHITE

Aides-mémoire Sarah Farrar

In 1930 French artist Henri Matisse spent three months in Tahiti, staying at a hotel in Papeete and then visiting the coral atolls of the Tuamotu archipelago. That visit was the impetus for Soon, the tide will turn (opposite) and To see and to know are not the same thing (page 255), two of the four works

by Robin White and Ebonie Fifita commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to accompany an exhibition of Henri Matisse in late 2021. Responding to his time in the Pacific and its often underappreciated impact on his late cutouts, these works present complex interior worlds, sites for imagined conversations across cultures, time and space. Here, Robin White and Ebonie Fifita seek to reposition Matisse into a Pacific context by drawing his work into some of the conventions of Pacific art – such as its patterns, materials and techniques – and into an active site of cross-cultural exchange.

Although uninhabited, each space evokes human presence. In one image, a notebook has been set aside on a pandanus mat while a casque colonial, or French colonial-style hat, rests on a patterned chaise longue. Two shoes have been neatly placed under a wooden chair on a floor comprised of the repeating triangular motif known as manulua, a design that is commonly found in tapa from Tonga, Sāmoa and Fiji (where it is called kamiki). In the other scene, a teapot sits alongside a transistor radio on a cabinet shelf. Two myna birds make an appearance, with one caught mid-flight across a large piece of calligraphy

by Japanese artist Taeko Ogawa, a meditation on the Chinese proverb calligraphy, ‘When you drink water, think of the origin’.

The assemblage of objects in each setting draws on a variety of sources: from Scottish novelist Robert Louis

Stevenson’s Samoan tapa-lined ‘smoking room’ at Villa Vailima in Apia, to the chaise longue and woven kete of the late Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey. Other items – shells, chairs, a vase and the pattern of White’s much-loved hibiscus lavalava – have migrated into the scenes from White’s home and studio in Masterton. Further objects, patterns and pictures have come from artworks by McCahon and Matisse, and those by White and her collaborators.

The titles of these works offer other points of departure: Soon, the tide will turn recalls advice given to White by McLeavey when the local audience in Aotearoa seemed unreceptive to her Kiribati work in the early 1980s.

Acknowledging that New Zealanders wanted ‘ikons of place’, McLeavey foresaw a time when the country would come to reorient itself in relation to the Pacific region. To see and to know are not necessarily the same is taken from an essay by Japanese philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu in his book The Beauty of Everyday Things.

Startlingly, in each image a bottle of hand sanitiser appears, a nod to the Covid-19 pandemic which has reduced travel and human movement more effectively than any other natural or man-made event in recent history. For White, who has travelled extensively throughout her life, Covid lockdowns have spurred a reflective period of ‘armchair travel’. Through her work, White is compelled to revisit places by memory, through conversations with her collaborators as well as friends and family, and by listening to the radio or referring to the photographs she has regularly taken over the years as aidesmémoire for her art-making.

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WHAKAORIORI MASTERTON

Robin White and Ebonie Fifita Soon, the tide will turn (2021) barkcloth, earth pigment, soot, plant-based liquid medium 2010 × 2210 mm Commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales

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ROBIN WHITE

Detail from: Robin White, Ebonie Fifita and Taeko Ogawa To see and to know are not necessarily the same (2021)

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INDEX

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ROBIN WHITE: SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE RRP: $70.00 ISBN: 978-0-9951384-3-8 PUBLISHED: June 2022 PAGE EXTENT: 304 pages FORMAT: Hardback SIZE: 280 x 210 mm

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