Opening Speakers:
Ben Plumbly, Director, Art & Object
Tungane Broadbent | Reuben Paterson, Artists
This exhibition presents as a conversation between the two diverse art forms, Paterson's extraordinary glitter paintings responding to the intricate fabric Tivaivai of Broadbent. Paterson litterally shines a spotlight on this important Pacific practice. Tivaivai are social biographies, timeless fabrics rich in social values, family genealogy, motif, history and nation, providing fundamental social discourse - linking past and present communal narrative.
Paterson himself is no stranger to the Tivaivai artform, having worked at Auckland Art Gallery's 'New Gallery' during the late 1990's where an important exhibition of Cook Islands Tivaivai was shown. Responding to Broadbent's work, Paterson has re-energized his celebrated botanical format with explosive colour and pattern. Reuben writes; ' When I began working with so much colour contained in one work again, my mind was taken back to when I was painting kowhaiwhai in colours not associated to the traditional red, black and white when I was honouring my father's passing in these works, and our descent lines to Ngati Rangitihi, Ngai Tuhoe and Tuhorangi.
Those same descent lines will always make me think of The Garden of the Seven Stones and Ngatangiia Harbour (Rarotonga) - these connections can all be bought back to this one place / point of departure, because it's all a part of the Whakapapa. Introducing so much colour again is literally influenced by Tivaivai, and the work of Tungane, and is also a way to acknowledge what the colours of kowhaiwhai meant to me at that time.'
