What is this all about?
Out of place is my note book. It charts my research into the representation of the New Zealand landscape in the colonial period.
My interest in this period was sparked by the paintings of Henry Thomas Garratt, an Auckland artist about whom very little was known, expect that he was prolific, and curiously, painted under a number of pseudonyms.
Researching any archive for evidence of one subject matter immediately reveals other, sometimes just as interesting material, and in trying to find out exactly who Garratt was, where he lived and how he promoted his paintings I came across many other landscape painters living and working in New Zealand at this time, many of whom generated hundreds of paintings of the country’s scenery. I found myself becoming interested in broader questions about this period in New Zealand’s cultural life. In a country with a relatively low population at the turn of the 19th century, how did so many artists manage to survive, if not flourish, what strategies did they use to sell their work, who were they painting for, and why was the landscape itself the focus of so much attention?
These questions are no less relevant today. The national preoccupation with the New Zealand landscape and its representation continues to be a major part of our cultural imaginings, in advertising, contemporary art, photography, conservation, tourism, popular art and film. It is the thing that promotes and sells the country, locally and internationally, in many avenues of economic life. It continues to be one of the most popular genres in New Zealand art, and its practice can be found almost everywhere from Trademe to auction houses, across media and between cultures – pakeha and Maori – while at the same time remains the hidden underside of New Zealand’s art production, if not shunned by the art establishment. This website will also be concerned with contemporary imaginings of the landscape, and tangential topics that were and remain deeply interconnected with landscape representation in New Zealand, then, and now.