Bread and Butter
Published in Artbeat, April 2025
Link to the full pdf here.
To encounter an archive is a gift that keeps on giving.
Opened just last November, the Archive Lounge at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is a dedicated space for the intimate reveal of fascinating materials behind the lives of many prominent artists in their collection. This month we are gifted with Bread and Butter, a celebration of the artists’ craft and perseverance in earning a living through illustration work to support their growing practices - and becoming some of New Zealand’s best-known artists.
In the serene presence of two modest display cabinets, twenty books and New Zealand School Journals are splayed open with curated precision, allowing one to extensively examine each specimen: yellowed pages, aged spots, sincere pencil scribbles and all. The School Journal has always been a significant time-capsule of national attitudes and cultural consciousness. With a history of over 100 years of distribution to schools in Aotearoa, the publication still runs today.
The display encapsulates a pivotal chapter with selections from the 1940s-50s, when the country was slowly finding its place in the world. More New Zealand stories and Māori subjects were replacing the extensive British material (such as biographies of the royal family) that came before. Rita Angus’ exquisite Kie-Kie illustration fuels a text that thoughtfully considers Māori names of our native flora before the arrival of the white man. Then, a technical drawing of the Canterbury weta by Des Helmore dazzles my senses with its agonisingly intricate detail as the page confesses they are found nowhere else in the world, though they do have relatives overseas.
Experiencing this collection requires a committed and slippery meandering through the real spaces between each publication, to fall into the magnetic pull of each spirited fable, poem, fish crossword, and soft notes uttered by wood pigeons (Kuku). Though I lack a direct nostalgia for the School Journal as it would invoke in certain generations, I still thoroughly appreciated this delicious slice of history, a fundamental bite of the artists that dreamed before me. I think of the vividly inked lines and the hopes held within them. One will walk out of this space with their brains fed, pulsating.
The display is an important invitation to burrow further into its larger library archive: the bread and butter to the gallery, and the art we see hanging on the very walls we meander through so tenderly today.
Bread and Butter
Archive Lounge, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
24 February – 27 April 2025
Link to the exhibition here.