Renowned NZ artists Wi Taepa and Marty Vreede exhibiting works in Whanganui

Marty Vreede, Wi Taepa, and Milly Mitchell-Anyon at Gallery 85 on Glasgow Street. Photo / Bevan Conley

Renowned ceramics artist Wi Taepa has been the artist in residence at Gallery 85 on Glasgow St since just before the Covid alert level 4 lockdown and now his work during that time is on display there.

Events during the Covid-19 pandemic and the people involved in it, such as political parties, ministers, and the public, are all part of his work.

"You listen to the commentary on Covid-19 and who's blaming who, and what's blaming what and all of that," Taepa said.

"I just made these [artworks] and started bashing them around, and it was like each party bashing each other, and each party finding something to bloody moan about."

Taepa said "I'm just the practitioner" and a lot of people had a part in the work.

"One side of it was that I didn't understand the kiln I was firing in, I was totally leaving it up to the people that owned the kiln.

"The kiln that I was using belonged to Leigh Anderton-Hall, so I had to allow her to take command of something that was completely out of my hands."

The collection, called "Uncertainty", was the start of a two-year project, Taepa said.

"Each of my works will grow to around about a metre high and up to a metre and a half to two metres wide."

In A Gallery next door, Whanganui printmaker Marty Vreede is displaying a collection called "Lots, Lost".

"This was out of a series orginially called 'Building a Nation'," Vreede said.

"It's an extension of the Waitangi Tribunal and land loss and how nothing seems to change over 150 years."

A sample of Marty Vreede's work that will be on the walls at A Gallery. Photo / Bevan Conley

His work had the "rhythm of letterpress", Vreede said, and was also influenced by the five-seven-five word structure of haiku poems.

"It's about looking at te reo Māori as well as English, and kind of unpicking a code.

"The word 'take', for instance, which in Māori means a purpose of some sort, or what you want to do, and the 'take' Pākehā have about land is just wanting it."

"I always like to subvert language, and for me it's 'rethink, rewrite, relearn', because historians are rethinking and rewriting history, and then it's up to us as people to learn facts like it wasn't Captain Cook who discovered New Zealand."

Whanganui art curator and writer Milly Mitchell Anyon recently wrote an essay on Vreede's work and spent time with Taepa at exhibitions in Dunedin and said getting Taepa's work to Whanganui was a "pretty big coup".

"He is an internationally significant artist and it was amazing that he spent the lockdown here working," Mitchell-Anyon said.

"He is a collaborator, not just with people, but with Papatūānuku and Tāwhirimātea, so he's taking it all on board when he's doing his works."

Regarding Vreede's work, Mitchell-Anyon said while it might look simple "on the surface", there were "layers upon layers" of history associated with it.

"You have to know all that history to be able to interpret it, and that's the power of Marty's work.

"I guess the same goes with Wi's work as well.

"On the surface it looks like a nice clay pot, but it's so much more than that; so much history has been woven into it."

"Pattern, Colour", a collection by local artist Tineke Paurini, is also on display in the corridor of the gallery.