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  • Fresh-Bread-2.jpg

    Robin White, Fresh Bread, from 'New Angel' series, 1998. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

  • I-am-doing-the-washing-in-the-bathroom.jpg

    Robin White, I am doing the washing in the bathroom from 'Beginner's Guide to Gilbertese' series, 1983. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

  • Instant-Sunshine.jpg

    Robin White, Instant Sunshine from the 'New Angel' series 1998. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Robin White

6 August - 6 November 2011 in the Hirschfeld Gallery

Robin White’s work often draws on her immediate environment, offering back her experience of a place, its people and culture in everyday, exquisitely articulated, terms. These works were made during the 17 years she and her family spent living on Tarawa, Kiribati, a remote atoll in the central Pacific. They register a shift in perspective, the need to establish new ways of working to reflect her sense of the sea-surrounded island on which she was now living.

The Hirschfeld Gallery features six series of works made during this time, primarily woodcuts, alongside woven pandanus tablemats, a table cloth, screenprints, and a photographic series. Across these works it’s possible to trace the artist’s essential openness to new processes, new ways of thinking about her practice, and an increasing interest in collaborative modes of working.

In addition to the Hirschfeld Gallery exhibition, a major recent work, Suka Siti (‘Sugar City’) (2009-10) is hung downstairs in the West Gallery. This masi was made in collaboration with Fijian artists Leba Toki and Bale Jione. Working together, they adopt the Baha’i tenet: consultation, action, then reflection. White describes it as ‘working in the space between… between cultures, between traditions, and learning how to operate in that space.’ The medium, place, and process are new for White; once again her work opens to its situation, embodying adaptation and processes of learning.

White’s ‘New Angel’ series (1998) of woven table mats were made after a fire destroyed her house, studio and materials. The artist began to work collaboratively with women from the Itoiningaina Catholic Women’s Training Centre. Each mat hosts a brand image from the packaging of products available in the island shops: fresh bread, New Angel tinned mackerel, Instant Sunshine milk powder. There are links to be made with Christian imagery of bread and fish, with hospitality and communal gathering around the table, and with Kiribati’s history of contact, food and trade.

‘Young Warriors’ (1998) is a photographic series depicting the command bunker on Tarawa, where during WWII Japanese soldiers were trapped and burnt in an American offensive in the critical central Pacific region. Bleak, horribly empty, these spaces speak directly to a darker history of Pacific encounter. Their sublime stillness is also terrible, troubling an uncomplicated reading of the Pacific island as paradise. These works acknowledge the space that needs to be made in any story about the Pacific for that which is not colourful, sun-lit and straightforward. Grounded in day to day detail and exchange, White’s works ask that we look with clear eyes, adopting compassion, and above all openness to learning.

Artist's Biography

Robin White was born in Te Puke in 1946, and in 1967 graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland. The following year she moved to Paremata to take up a teaching position, and in 1971 to Dunedin to work full-time as an artist. In 1982 she moved with her family to Kiribati to work with the Baha'i community. The artist now lives and works in Masterton. White represented New Zealand at the Sydney Biennale in 1986, and in the First Asia/Pacific Triennale in Brisbane in 1993. In 2002 a survey show, Island Life: Robin White in New Zealand and Kiribati, was toured around New Zealand by the Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin. Last year a collaborative tapa work, A New Garden (2009), was shown at the Fifth Asia/Pacific Triennial. White has work in the collections of all major public art galleries in New Zealand, and in galleries across Australia.

Further Reading

Beginning, and beginning by Abby Cunnane

Please visit www.oceania.org.nz for more information about Oceania: Imagining the Pacific, the wider exhibition of which Robin White is a component.