Touchstones

Ahead of the Aotearoa Art Fair, Sally Blundell asks New Zealand artists about their favourite local artwork and why it moves them.

LAURENCE ABERHART, photographer 

To me, there are two categories to this question: work that I admire, and work that I covet.

The work I most admire is Robin White's painting Summer Grass. When I saw it for the first time in very humble surroundings, I thought, "How brave.

How beautiful." The subject of the painting, which is never stated except in the most oblique way, through imagery, alludes to the Japanese POW riot and deaths in the Featherston camp they were imprisoned in, in which 48 prisoners and a guard were killed in February 1943. I was moved by the fact that the artist was choosing a most unpalatable subject, one that had almost been ignored in our collective social history, and delivered her message and memorial in the most beautiful painterly and seemingly understated manner. Epic in size and subject.

The artwork I most covet, though, is a painting by Bill Hammond, Verdi Verde. Every time I see it, I feel an outright lust for it and want to wrap myself inside its warm, green lusciousness.

FIONA PARDINGTON, photographer

My most beloved artworks in Aotearoa are the Māori rock drawings winding through the highlands of Te Waipounamu. Those lumps of limestone, charged up with psychic energy, with all the little underground rivulets and trickles of water running through them into the aquifer and then into those cool, dark, quiet places - the cavities and caves, the womb of Papatūānuku where we all come from and to where we all return - and then those beautiful, sensuous patterns and drawings.

It's like I've stuck my finger into an electrical outlet: I'm plugged into the mana of my Kāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe tīpuna. I'm seeing through their eyes.