John Walsh

Date:

Saturday, 26 November 2016 - 12:00am to Sunday, 22 January 2017 - 12:00am

Location: Opus Gallery, Te Kōputu a te whanga a Toi - Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre

Of Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti and New Zealand Irish decent, Walsh was born in 1954 in Uawa, Tolaga Bay on the East Coast of the North Island to an idyllic childhood of sun, surf stories and whanau. Here he learned of his ancestor Te Rangiuia, the last tohunga of Te Whare Wānanga o Te Rawheoro (The Place of Learning of Te Rawheoro) that closed after the death of Te Rangiuia’s son.

In 1973, Walsh attended Ilam School of Art at Canterbury University, but the structure of art school didn’t fit well with Walsh, and in 1974 he returned home. On return he worked cutting scrub, staying in shearing huts and riding horses in the backcountry. In his down time he taught himself to paint through realist portraits of local figures, friends and whanau of Uawa. This culminated in a large, 20-metre mural of Uawa and its people that took 18 months to finish, completed in 1980. Walsh’s connection to the East Coast landscape, his relationship with the local people, and its rich histories are central to his painting.

Throughout the 1980s Walsh travelled around Aotearoa, worked on marae restoration projects and at Tairawhiti Museum in Gisborne. These experiences helped form a reverence for the histories of Aotearoa, and this was further cemented by Walsh and his family moving to Wellington in 1993, where he worked as Curator of Contemporary Māori Art at the National Gallery (now Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa). During this time he had the privilege to delve into the national collection and view first-hand, a rich selection of Māori architectural elements with narratives of marakihau (sea guardian), manaia (spiritual guardian), and atua (a god). These narratives of magical beings inform the anthropomorphic figures that swim and float across the fluid and ethereal landscapes of Walsh’s work.

Walsh’s painting oscillates between the worlds of the everyday and dreams, painting the spirit of the land as a stage for the dramas of human existence. He uses the stories and mythologies of the past to reflect on the world of today, creating his own worlds.

‘I’m orchestrating my own characters and stories. Sometimes I reference specific incidents, but generally I’m making them up, constructing stories and metaphors around current events and issues that beg comment.’ Walsh

Walsh intertwines a wide range of sources to create sublime landscapes with dense narratives. His paintings show a respect for an ancient time when humans were connected to the natural world, but they transcend their sources and invite the viewer on a journey into the universal.