KEY POINTS:
In A bright, spacious and mostly empty room on Norfolk Island is a series of striking paintings by New Zealand artist Pauline Thompson. A couple are hung on the wall but the rest are simply stacked on top of each other. The few computers on some desks in
this otherwise bare room attract more attention.
Those who come to this place to use the internet barely glance at the seven large and colourful works full of detailed, inter-related iconography and narratives of Norfolk.
The series, Under The Horizon, was painted by Thompson, of Auckland's North Shore, whose earlier works are in Te Papa, the Auckland City Art Gallery, the Dowse Museum and other public and private collections.
To see this series so marginalised is not only sad but ill-deserved because the paintings address in metaphoric and symbolic ways a history of Norfolk's founders, those descendants of the Bounty mutineers who were transported from Pitcairn Island to this new home in 1856.
Thompson, whose mother was a Buffet from one of those original families, and who has had a long connection with Norfolk, created her series for the island's 150th anniversary celebrations in June last year which she attended. They were originally displayed in the historic restored homestead at 9 Quality Row.
Thompson, angry when told her paintings are languishing in a corner of the former Norfolk Island Data Systems building, says her works have barely been seen by islanders or visitors. "On Quality Row the exhibition opened on a Tuesday and they were taken down on the Friday because they said it wasn't appropriate for them to be there, they needed the place for receptions. So I was ringing around trying to find a place to put them."
Thompson returned to New Zealand the following week, and a friend on the island found a place for them in the computer room, where they were originally all hung. Some were taken down and shoved in the corner - and Under The Horizon has needed a permanent home ever since.
The paintings, each 143cm x 76cm, are priced at $5250 for individual works. The four-part series on founder George Hunn Nobbs, Thompson's great-great-great-grandfather, is $18,250.
But Norfolk's modest budget doesn't stretch that far and although there are wealthy people on the island none have come forward to rescue the works.
"That's a pretty low price," Thompson says. "Dammit, there are God knows how many multi-millionaires on the island because it's a tax haven. You just need a few people to put in a bit. The painting of them took several months but I had been drawing and writing for about two years before that."
Under The Horizon presents a problem: outside Norfolk the paintings probably have little resonance as they are engaged in a specific and integrated narrative about Norfolk and its founders, rendered in vibrant colours which evoke the island's fauna and flora, and with repeated refrains of island symbolism. Their natural home would seem to be Norfolk - and Norfolk only.
"Yes, you would need to have information about them, which is why I also produced a booklet with background in it and some fairly rustic poems," says Thompson.
Each long canvas is divided by a strong vertical - a blaze of light from the sun or a star above, or what appears to be a shaft of fire from a body below. In each corner is emblematic imagery of birds, six-pointed stars, roses, candles, flowers, or flames rising from the masts of the Bounty burning.
"The series isn't done as a historical thing, it is mythological as much as anything else," Thompson says.
"The rose, like the whales, just started to come into the paintings.
"I don't know it was on the island at that time [of settlement] but the people love it and you could say it is a mystic thing. In the painting of The Women, about the strength of Norfolk women, the rose is over the woman's heart so it refers to the mother/goddess thing.
"When I was working on the paintings I kept being woken in the night with dreams and poems going through my head. I became severely sleep-deprived, but would just get another angle on the paintings."
Thompson would frequently call her friend Margaret Christian on the island to discuss her dreams and their spiritual symbolism as they related to Norfolk.
"I sort of felt it was ancestors, or that part of you genetically that psychologically leaks through from the subconscious.
"I felt I had to put those things in and work out why afterwards. These things tend to be multi-layered and you can't really explain them."
So while Under The Horizon is grounded in the myths and history of Norfolk, it also carries deep personal imagery.
To break up the series would diminish its collective power.
Despite disappointment and anger, her works are so sidelined on the island that she visits frequently, Thompson hopes they will stay in the place for which they were intended.
"Australia is going to, I think, help them get a Norfolk Island Cultural Centre at the old cable station at Anson Bay - so they might hang there. One would hope they wouldn't end up covered in fungus with the damp from the sea and wind. But when that will happen, and if the people on Norfolk decide to buy them, is another thing."
An encouraging sign has been that some members of the legislative assembly are enthusiastic about them remaining on the island.
Failing that, "In 2008 I am going to have an exhibition of Norfolk painting I have done over the years on the North Shore. If they are not going to buy them I'm going to bring them back here. I'd be able to sell them here, there are a lot of Norfolk people over here. But I actually painted them for there."
