The collaborations between the country’s pre-eminent artist Ralph Hotere and one of its leading poets, Bill Manhire, are some of the most enriching in New Zealand’s cultural landscape. Hotere’s work has long been regarded as occupying a unique place in our recent art history, with its profoundly moving combination of complete affinity to the land, sombre beauty, emotional intensity, personal integrity and political address. His use of hitherto unexpected materials, steel, iron or salvaged window frames, has granted his work both clarity of expression because of their modesty and lyrical freedom by virtue of the expressive leaps he achieves with them. Similarly, Manhire’s poetry reflects and enables new and affecting ways of encountering the world, often quietly painful and often from the most prosaic of circumstances. The Wind II sits within what is perhaps the most extraordinary and most intellectually and emotionally expansive period of Hotere’s oeuvre: from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. First shown (as Baby Iron No.3) in the Baby Iron exhibition at Janne Land Gallery in Wellington in October 1983 then at RKS Art Auckland in December of the same year, it is one of the more lyrical and to some extent mysterious of the 11 pieces that appeared in that showing. As fresh and beautiful as it was 25-plus years ago, it retains its original Roger Hickin driftwood frame with his initials inscribed into the top edge, and his stamp verso.
In The Wind II, Hotere explores the properties of the polished steel in a way that delights both in the physical properties available to him and in the moving, enlivened surfaces that result. His use of an oxyactetylene torch to mark out a strong, cruciform composition establishes a stable structure to the work that strengthens the activating fire-mark in the upper left quadrant (like a finger or comet of heat) as well as the almost playful peeling back of the steel to reveal a scarlet second ground in the lower right. It also adds a strong, though subtle, degree of colour variation to the shiny surface of the metal that softens the reflective surface: humanises it somehow.
That invigorated surface then becomes the lively ground for the burnishing tool: Hotere transcribing one of Manhire’s texts that turns up on different occasions in his work – whether in a Song Cycle banner of 1976 or a stainless-steel screen from 1987. There’s a finely poised confluence between the text of this poem and the manner of its realisation. The shift of the dullness and reflection of the surface and the appearing and disappearing of words as you move before the work seem to call up the wind of its opening line: to activate growing shadows in ways that seem, all at once, to encourage and then refuse a lover’s touch, collapse and then extend the distance between the two people in the poem – as if the promised yet denied proximity hinted at here is akin to some vertiginous moment of a lovers’ encounter. Is this a reconciliation or a separation: a coming together or an estrangement conveyed by the strange, haunting question of the speaker and the change observed in the air?
The publisher, painter and writer Janet Paul remarked that Hotere’s achievement in the Baby Iron works was “an animating way to free the gesture with a poetic chemistry, allowing the flame to augment his marks and engage our spirit”. Such a description of the gestural and textual affect is entirely appropriate for this exquisite and moving example of Hotere’s work from such a significant and compelling suite. DR PETER SHAND
Janet Paul: Ralph Hotere’s Baby Iron, Art New Zealand 29, Summer 1983/84, pp. 22–23.
Refer also: Kriselle Baker and Vincent O’Sullivan, Hotere, Ron Sang Publications, 2008; Gregory O’Brien Some Paintings I Am Frequently Asked About: Talking with Bill Manhire about Ralph Hotere, Landfall 191, March 1996, pp. 21–33; Gregory O’Brien, Hotere: Out the Black Window, Godwit, 1997.