3–31 August 2019
While staying near Te Kaha in the eastern Bay of Plenty earlier this year, I reread Judith Binney’s biography of Te Kooti, Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, Redemption Songs. The countryside we travelled through to get there – the pumice country of Rotorua, the Kaingaroa plains stretching out, with the Urewera Hill country lying on the horizon, its intimate relationship with the coast – allowed me to connect with the book in a way I hadn’t on first reading.
What struck me most about Te Kooti’s writing was his profound empathy with his surroundings, both in the geographical sense and in a more general metaphorical way – his shared identity with this world. It led me to think of our contemporary issue of climate change and our part in it. It reminded me of our need to connect with the natural world, the one we alienate ourselves from – at our own peril.
These paintings, Between Heaven and Earth, are an attempt to reveal the beauty of the natural world and to reach beyond it to an ideal one, a heavenly one that lies in parallel, on the periphery of our vision.
Tony Lane, July 2019
