A conversation with writers Tina Makereti, Gregory Kan, and Gwynneth Porter, chaired by Thomasin Sleigh.

Writers are inspired and challenged by the visual arts, whether it be for its politics, its abstraction, its humour, or through creative and productive friendships with the artists themselves. But what does ‘responding’ to an artwork really mean? What are a writer’s specific considerations for different commissions and publications? Beyond the essay, what is the potential of fiction, poetry, and other literary forms to respond to a work of visual art? And what is the role of the reader, as the third party in a collaboration between a writer and artist?

This episode was recorded at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery on 24 May 2023, in conjunction with the CIRCUIT exhibition ‘Legacies: Five Short Films for Cinema’ by Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell, and Sriwhana Spong, 13 May - 30 July 2023.

A starting point for this kōrero is the accompanying Legacies reader edited by CIRCUIT’s 2022 Writer in Residence, Thomasin Sleigh. The conversation begins with Thomasin Sleigh inviting Tina Makereti to read an excerpt from her short story, Black Milk (2016), which is republished in the reader. This story was written in response to a photograph by Fiona Pardington and went on to be the Pacific Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2016.

Tina is joined in conversation by writers Gregory Kan and Gwynneth Porter to discuss their writing and its dynamic and evolving relationship to the visual arts.

Please note there is a brief microphone malfunction from 36-39 minutes.

Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, selects a performance in the exhibition and reads the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading will be between 15 and 20 minutes with time for questions after.

In this reading Tina reads both Peter Roche’s and Wystan Curnow’s original notes written soon after the Night Piece performance, executed in the Old Gasworks in Freemans Bay in Auckland. This was undertaken in the dark without the permission of the site’s owners and entailed Linda crawling along the length of a 60-foot wall, a surviving fragment of a much larger structure, while Peter lit candles at points along the wall’s base. Wystan was the only audience member. The two accounts were later integrated and published in 1983 in the first issue of Parallax, a new journal dedicated to postmodern art and literature. We are grateful to both authors for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience.

Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, selects a performance in the exhibition and reads the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading will be between 15 and 20 minutes with time for questions after.

In this reading Tina reads Wystan Curnow’s original notes written soon after attending Peter Roche & Linda Buis’s Liaison performances at Real Pictures in Auckland in March 1980. This was the first time the pair performed together in public as an acknowledged duo. Tina uses the occasion to track the shift from live action to historical event by then reading the notes prepared for the exhibition as a foil to Curnow’s raw report. We are grateful to the author for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience

Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, will select a performance in the exhibition and read the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading will be between 10 and 20 minutes with time for questions after.

In this reading Tina delivers artist Peter Roche's notes around the performances of Oh Shit No, On the Contrary, and offers insights into this part of the timeline, which is at the point where Linda Buis starts to play an active role that will lead eventually into a shared practice.

Please note that Peter Roche's use of expletives in his writing have not been censored in this recording.

Welcome to the first episode of ‘Walking, Talking, Reading, Writing’ Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s podcast series exploring themes running through the exhibitions ‘Nick Austin: Life Puzzle’ and ‘Aro Toi / Art Collection in Focus: Ana Iti, A dusty handrail on the track’. The common point of departure is a push-pull approach to language and physical structure, referencing different approaches to narrative sequencing and spanning physical or temporal distances.

This episode features Rachel O’Neill, a Pākehā queer filmmaker, writer and artist living and working between the Kāpiti Coast and Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Rachel develops screen-based projects, writes books and collaborates on cross-disciplinary projects, seeking out fresh ways to see and understand the human condition and to unearth the humour and strangeness that underlie experience.

On the 8th of March 2023 Rachel presented a playful and poetic discussion exploring the interpersonal tones and shifting arrays of voices that shape our day. During this talk, participants were invited to spend some time ‘listening to the voice’ of an artwork of their choice, exploring it in relation to self, moment and situation. It was hoped that these personal ‘found sounds’ might generate curious ‘chords’ of experience for private or group reflection.

The talk was an intriguing undertaking that provoked a unique reading of the exhibition. This episode is Rachel’s adaption for podcast, opening the experience to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Lunchtime talk

12pm 08 December 2022

Join us to explore some recent poems by writers who identify with or respond to the mermaid as a figure who slips between categories. Ōtepoti artist and poet, Jessica Hinerangi Thompson- Carr aka the Māori Mermaid, joins curator Megan Dunn to discuss their individual resonance with mermaid symbology. The Māori mermaid reads her own work and talks about the work of others from poetry to popular culture, shining light on the imaginative potential of the mermaid and its relevance to contemporary Aotearoa.

Jessica Hinerangi Thompson-Carr is Ngāruahine, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāpuhi, and Pākehā. She is 26 years old and currently works as an artist, poet, and writer, often under the name Māori Mermaid (@maori_mermaid on instagram). Her inspiration comes from her whakapapa and she is constantly seeking more information about herself and her future through her poetry and art.

This is the third and final in our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'The Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.

Lunchtime talk

12pm 01 December 2022

O’Brien held many roles during his long life – he had been a radar operator in the airforce, a businessman, a city councillor, and eventually the president of the World Peace Council. As a prominent politician he was elected during a time of change within both the Labour Party and within Aotearoa as a whole. In this lunchtime talk political historian, Jim McAloon, offers compelling insights into the social and political context in which Gerald O’Brien lived and worked.

Jim McAloon is a professor of history at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has a wide range of interests in the economic and social history of New Zealand and other places. For some years he’s taught a second year course in New Zealand political history, and has published a number of works in the field, including (with Peter Franks) Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916-2016 (2016).

This is from our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'the Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.

This episode features the interviews Megan Dunn, curator/creator of the exhibition The Mermaid Chronicles, undertook via Zoom to support the public programme screenings of mermaid-centric films ‘Splash’, ‘Million Dollar Mermaid’ and ‘I’ve Heard The Mermaid Singing’.

We hear from Robert Short – mermaid tail-maker for Splash, Dr Jenny Kokai – author of Swim Pretty Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature, and Patricia Rozema - director of I’ve Heard the Mermaid Singing.

Lunchtime Talk recorded on 17 November 2022

Lucien Rizos in conversation with Gregory O'Brien.

Gerald O’Brien was like a father to Lucien Rizos, yet throughout their time together O’Brien never mentioned his lifelong creative project which is featured in Rizos’s exhibition, Everything. Join Rizos in conversation with Wellington artist and writer Gregory O’Brien as they discuss and try to make sense of O’Brien’s life and the fantasy world he kept secret.

Gregory O'Brien is a Wellington poet, essayist and painter who curated exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington between 1997 and 2009. While there, he worked with Lucien Rizos on his 2005 exhibition Where I find myself. Gregory O'Brien's monograph on painter Don Binney is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2023.

Everything is a project by Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist Lucien Rizos. Over three years he has documented the possessions of his uncle, Gerald O’Brien (1924–2017), Labour Party MP for Island Bay (1969–78) and local businessman. Rizos has organised his documentation into more than 60 magazines that canvass everything O’Brien kept relating to his public and private life. He has also made detailed composite photographs of his uncle’s bookshelves as an extended portrait of someone he was close to and deeply admired. This exhibition brings Rizos’s large-scale photographs, magazines and scanned imagery together with actual artefacts from O’Brien’s archive. It focuses in particular on Rizos’s most startling find. This is his uncle’s secret art project worked on from childhood well into his adult life that invented a parallel world with an alternate geography, nation states, public figures and histories. The exhibition presents invented maps, lists, newspapers and hand-written histories as well as hundreds of his cut-out and hand-painted figures that represent named personages holding public office in his imagined world. Working with curator Robert Leonard, Rizos both offers up his uncle’s secret life to its first public scrutiny and tests the capacity of his medium to effectively tell O’Brien’s story.

This was the first in our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'the Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.

This episode is captured from a panel discussion ‘Writing About Painting’, which occurred in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Barbara Tuck – Delirium Crossing’ at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, on Wednesday 17th August 2022.

Developed as a partnership between Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland; Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, ‘Barbara Tuck – Delirium Crossing’ evolved as a conscious alternative to the conventional retrospective. For ‘Delirium Crossing’ paintings were chosen by fifteen writers and their texts collated in an accompanying catalogue, fulfilling the artist’s ambition to create a forum for thinking about her medium, as much as a tool to canvass her practice.

Listen here to editors, Christina Barton and Anna Miles, and Susan Ballard, Lachlan Taylor, and Hanahiva Rose, three of the fourteen writers included in the publication accompanying Tuck’s exhibition, as they discuss their approaches to writing about painting and to Tuck’s work in particular.

Susan Ballard is an Associate Professor of Art History at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her most recent book is ‘Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics’ (2021), and she recently curated the exhibition ‘Listening Stones Jumping Rocks’ at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery.

Christina Barton is director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery and a curator and art historian with specialist knowledge of the history of New Zealand art, especially after 1960. She first encountered Barbara Tuck’s paintings in the early 1990s, including her in the exhibition ‘Surface Tension: Ten Artists in the ’90s’ at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1991.

Anna Miles is an Auckland art dealer and lecturer in visual arts at Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau. She has represented the work of Barbara Tuck since 2006.

Hanahiva Rose (Ngāi Tahu, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is a writer and curator based in Paekākāriki. She has held curatorial positions at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Te Papa and is widely published for her writing on modern and contemporary art practices in Aotearoa.

Lachlan Taylor is a writer and curator living in Pōneke Wellington. He holds MAs in both Art History (2018) and Creative Writing (2022) from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. In 2021 he took on the role of commissioning editor of the ArtNow Essays digital platform. Lachlan’s writing has been published in Art + Australia, Art News New Zealand, Art New Zealand, ArtNow, the Art Paper, and The Pantograph Punch.