He Ao!
Lost Boy, oil on canvas
January 2007
I had a dream. I went to visit a friend I hadn't seen in nine years. An open armed reunion and tears, you can imagine how it was. And then we stood on the back porch and looked out over the whenua, his papa kainga. The land around us was a painting, in volcanic colours, reds, purples and browns, and in the distance I could see, as he pointed them out one by one, figures of people, standing in amongst the landscape in the place of mountains, trees and hills. "That mountain there", he said pointing to a distant figure of a woman, "she's been stirring lately". Then, as it always goes, I woke up.
God, I miss home.
It was in the New Year of 1998, on a summer holiday in the East Cape with this mate of mine that I decided to get out of New Zealand, to run away and search for "the world". Finding that guy playing flamenco guitar on the steps of the Te Araroa Diary was a sign. My friend was sad I left, I was sad I left, but I had to "do my thing" and he his.
I have to thank running away and Spain for leading me back to making my own work. Had it not been for those events, I might not be here, making my work and writing this.But I am not at home. No people look back at me from this landscape (yet). So it leads me to the question: am I less of a New Zealand painter if I choose to reside outside the country?
I went to an art fair yesterday to look at a snapshot of Spanish Galleries and the work they deal with. The work showed that me clearly where I was. What struck me about the fair and last year's Biennale of Seville was how accustomed I was to seeing the world and tackling issues from a standpoint so particular to New Zealand, I struggle to describe exactly what it is.
Being outside New Zealand is part of the compromise of loving and being with someone who is not a New Zealander. We share two worlds and for a period, we are in his. This is the case for thousands of us. Looking at the KEA website the other day, a website for networking among New Zealanders in and outside the country, I was struck to see that Te Kohanga Reo was celebrating ten years in London, che! Perhaps for some of us floating around in the global pond, being in undefined territory is no longer something to struggle against, as I do.
Did you know, Te Tairawhiti , the East Coast, has its partner coast on the other side of the world? It’s called La Costa del Sol, the coast of the sun, and just as it crosses the sky to dive into the other world every night at Te Tai Hau-uru, the West Coast, the ancient sun crosses the Spanish peninsula to dive every night into the sea of Galicia at Finisterre, world’s end. This path is spoken of in stone carvings on the Galician coast dating back thousands of years to the celtic migrations. It is a path once of refuge, now of reflection, today known as El Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that crosses Europe to end in the ocean, at the end of the world, not far from where I am in the winter New Year of 2007.