From the MTG: Poets give voice to nature's influences

Memory believes before knowing remembers by Peter Madden 2016, Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection. Photo / Supplied

Among the myriad of sketches, textiles and paintings in our Nature Culture exhibition, and in the company of photographs, videos and sculptures, the Napier Live Poets will soon use poetry to give voice to nature's indelible influence in our lives.

Today at 11am, the exhibition will play host to established local poets reciting poetry inspired by the artworks of established local artists.

As a Napier Live Poet and MTG staff member myself, I confess to being somewhat exalted by the privilege. After all, the role of artists — literary, visual, or audio visual — is to connect the observer to the source of inspiration and in their own peculiar way, inspire! In the common vernacular, the passion of artists, like myself, is to share something really cool that we found.

Through their works, the Nature Culture artists demonstrate peacefully what sacred things they discovered in the overlap between the human world and the natural order. Curated by Toni MacKinnon and crafted by a crack-team of designers and technicians, the result is flat-out magic.

The Napier Live Poets (NLP) are abuzz as they industriously inhabit the space and specifically the artworks that speak to them. Jeremy Roberts and Erice Fairbrother, co-conspirators behind the NLP, are positively fizzing about the exhibition that quite frankly radiates from the centre of being.

Erice has been a devout spokeswoman for the egalitarian voice of poets for most of her life, and Jeremy masterfully emcees the metaphorical menagerie — he's kind of a Jim Morrison meets William Burroughs.

Peter Madden's Memory believes before knowing remembers is a piece in the exhibition which I found particularly enchanting. It takes its name from a book by American writer William Faulkner, aptly titled (like the intentions for our poetry event), Light in August: "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

As if a thousand moonlit memories were butterflies pinned inside a display case to, by way of collage, create an overall image of something deeply moving and yet only just on the verge of recognition.

It's a prophetic face, or maybe a visceral heart, both or neither, composed of individual pastoral elements, weather phenomena, slice of life moments, microscopic pollen and celestial bodies. I was hooked.

The work itself is like a kind of visual poetry freed of linear constraints. Only the observer's experience over time is linear, as the eye journeys through a snowy bestiary, or across a flowery night sky, or inward into ineffable matters of the heart, perhaps lost love or a sense of adventure.

Madden conjures that dream-like quality, that phantasmagoria projected from his mind's magic lantern. What else could I do but take the journey myself, as a poet, as a human being alive in our time, as an adventurer? I felt buoyed by his dioramic vision even as I pondered endlessly, never satisfied to say that I'd figured it out. I loved it.

Naturally the poems won't necessarily be elucidating the artworks. They are triggered by them, like nostalgia, or an artistic triple shot cappuccino. The various works will have inspired a multitude of poetic responses.

Some individual pieces will have likely played muse to multiple poets providing more or less distinct ruminations. I've been moved to write two poems so far and look forward to sharing my poetic enthusiasm for the art responsible. Be seeing you, in the Light of August.

NATURE / CULTURE / POEMS is a free public programme being held at MTG Hawke's Bay, Saturday, August 6 at 11am.

Jason Micheal Dunn is MTG Customer Services Assistant