Join the Always Song in the Water artists including John Pule, Robin White and Gregory O'Brien for an afternoon within the exhibition as they share the stories and art connecting them to Moana Oceania.
Bookings are recommended.
Artists Elizabeth Thomson, John Pule, Robin White, Phil Dadson and John Reynolds will talk with curator Gregory O'Brien about the life-changing experience of sailing to Rangitāhua Raoul Island in May 2011. The artists will discuss the relationship between Moana Oceania and their ongoing creative lives, and celebrate the cultural and artistic influences which bring together peoples from across the Pacific.
Join artists Robin White, Ebonie Fifita and friends as they share stories about their collaborative art practice and the creation of ‘In the Offing’, a stunning masi currently on display in Always Song in the Water.
The ocean is our shared inheritance, our great future. Share the voyage of dreams, myths and cultural memory through the words and poetry of John Pule, Gregory O’Brien and friends.
Afterwards, the artists will sign copies of the book, 'Always song in the water' in the museum store.
John Pule is the foremost contemporary visual artist of Pacific Island descent. Born in Niue in 1962, Pule is a writer as well as a visual artist. He has published numerous collections of poems as well as two groundbreaking novels, The Shark That Ate the Sun (Penguin, 1992) and Burn My Head in Heaven (Penguin, 1998). Pule’s artworks and words are featured in Always Song in the Water.
Gregory O’Brien is a poet, artist and writer of non-fiction. For some years, after the voyage to Rangitāhua Raoul Island in 2011, he was a participant in the ‘Kermadec’ art initiative and the associated exhibitions, which were presented as far afield as New Caledonia and Santiago de Chile. With Jaqui Knowles, he is the co-curator of the exhibition Always Song in the Water – Art Inspired by Moana Oceania at the New Zealand Maritime Museum.
Dame Robin White (Ngāti Awa) is one of New Zealand’s greatest visual artists. She was one of the most prominent painters of the 1970s and subsequently lived on the island of Tarawa in the Republic of Kiribati for 17 years before returning to New Zealand in 1999. She is now based in Masterton but continues to work with weavers and artists from around the Pacific. Her artworks and sketchbook are featured in Always Song in the Water.
Located 1,000 kms north of New Zealand, the Kermadec region remains one of the few unspoiled places on Earth. It straddles both tropical and temperate climates and is home to a vibrant array of marine life as well as fascinating geological features like underwater volcanoes and the Kermadec-Tonga trench which plunges more than 10kms beneath the ocean’s surface.
In 2011 Pew Charitable Trust organised an artists’ voyage to the region as an opportunity to encounter, experience and document this pristine region.
“The voyage was an ideal opportunity to consider the relationship between humanity and the ocean, and to begin to contemplate the all-encompassing, life-giving power of the oceanic environment.”
Gregory O’Brien