We live in a time where the connection between humans and the rest of the natural world, the plants, animals and wild spaces that co-exist around us, is increasingly more complicated and unbalanced. Ethnobotany, the connection between humans and plants, has guided artist Dr Tabatha Forbes work for the past 20 years, and was the starting point for her new exhibition, The Printed Hibiscus, at Bergman Gallery Tāmaki Makaurau.
“The way for me to connect with place is through the study of plants. My love of that connection, of the intimacy of botanical connection, has never dispersed. I teach it. I practice it,” says Forbes. “I’m a big researcher - every exhibition for me starts with the research. This show has been three years in the making; it has a global context and a broader conversation about how we regards symbols, in particular plants.”
In this case the symbol is the hibiscus, a flower most often associated with the South Pacific. Now based in Ōpunake, Aotearoa New Zealand, Forbes and her family moved to Rarotonga in 2010, living in the Cook Islands for six years. Here, Forbes was surrounded by the flora of the islands, where “hibiscus are in everyone’s garden, everybody wears floral prints.”
Forbes and Ben Bergman, Director of Bergman Gallery, have worked together for 10 years, Forbes having three solo shows at Bergman Gallery in Rarotonga. The Printed Hibiscus is Forbes first exhibition in the gallery’s Tāmaki Makaurau space.
“Tabatha really connects with the subject matter through the detail in her images - she connects to a sense of place,” says Bergman. “Her work is always deeply researched and nuanced.”
When the concept of a show based on the hibiscus was initially suggested by Bergman, Forbes was not so sure. The idea though stayed with her, partially formed, looking for a way to be realised. This came eventually through a photograph from the 1990s of her grandfather in a Hawaiian shirt. “My grandparents spent over a decade travelling to Hawai’i during the winters. Pops would return wearing his Hawaiian shirts. I saw the photograph and started thinking about the stylised hibiscus in fabric history and print,” says Forbes. “There is a global history of influence which I thought was really interesting - you think Hawaiian shirt, this cliché, kitsch American construct but there’s this bigger story, and for me it’s always the bigger story that resonates about how we perceive things.”
Forbes learnt that the Hawaiian shirts worn by her grandfather were originally inspired by Tahitian patterns from C19th, the shirt design in turn traced back to early C20th Japanese and Chinese tailors and merchants in Hawai’i, and manufactured for American servicemen and tourists. “I started with botanical studies of my hibiscus. This is the first exhibition I’ve ever done in watercolour - I’ve worked with house paint for 20 years. I’ve avoided water colour and I’ve avoided flower painting - that stereotype was really uncomfortable with me,” says Forbes. “For this exhibition, I’ve made myself quite uncomfortable working through different processes, working through the challenge of a very clichéd icon, and trying to push those boundaries for myself. So what you see in this show is various stages of deconstruction of those ideas and of my own practice.”
The hibiscus watercolours are named with lines from William Blake’s well-known poem from 1789, The Tyger, Forbes connecting her “simple watercolours” with names of weight - Purple / In what distant deeps or skies and Orange / What hand dare seize the fire.
“I learnt the first verse of that poem as a kid,” says Forbes, recently discovering that Blake’s work challenged the predominant Christian ideology of that time. “Blake had this really subtle subversion through his writing; it’s not black or white, good or bad, it’s a complex combination of all of these things. Hibiscus, Tyger tyger is that for me. I wanted to use these classic and quite misunderstood symbols in opposition with each other - a global commentary on the difficulty of binaries, of looking at the world in this way. In Hibiscus, Tyger tyger, the two motifs, the hibiscus and the tiger are bound together with convolvulus, a creeping vine that is present all over the South Pacific.”
While the hibiscus is often associated with femininity, fragility, and the South Pacific, the tiger is associated with its opposites – masculinity, dominance and China. Forbes describes her tiger image as “intentionally playful and subversive, connecting to me personally and the broader story of the hibiscus motifs global history.” The two symbols, the hibiscus and the tiger, are paired in Fearful Symmetry, a perfectly symmetrical tiger portrait in hot pink LED light, and Fearful Symmetry II, a digital print of the hibiscus.
The watercolour painting, Hibiscus, Tyger tyger became the centrepiece for Forbes fabric design, a medium she had wanted to work with “since playing with my grandmother’s exquisite piles of silks from their time living in Hong Kong.” In the exhibition, the fabric is draped and paired with, Fallen, a closed or resting hibiscus, the fabric purposely creating an unsettling presence, a tension, in the room of delicate watercolours. The fabric design is worn by Forbes on the opening night, her kimono styled coat created by Nana of Hena Hena, a Japanese Kimono tailor from Ashburton, bringing this aspect of the story in full circle.
Like all of the works, it also has a personal connection. Forbes had recently rescued a hibiscus plant from her grandmother’s garden, the plant first blossoming after her grandmother passed away. “The flower, beautiful and fragile, closed and curled in on itself. It felt like a last dance. I wanted to include not just the ephemeral but also the beauty in its closing,” says Forbes.
The hibiscus works are deconstructed in a series of prints based on the watercolour Yellow / When the stars threw down their spears. The wall of pop culture coloured prints are purposely named in a simplified and binary fashion - Pink/Good, Orange/Hell, Red/Bad. Unlike the mass production they represent, each of the prints are laboriously made by hand with six colour plates used per image, printed onto cotton rag paper and hung on hangers, in themselves a work of fabric design.
“I’ve never done anything so bright nor have I deconstructed my work in this way but it was irresistible. We know the hibiscus is this overused, over-saturated brand representing the South Pacific, and I wanted to approach this idea,” says Forbes. “I consider the possibility that these motifs repeated, over and over, may become simplified and meaningless, or as Andy Warhol commented on his repeated series, ‘the more you look at the same exact thing…the better and emptier you feel’.”
In its entirety, the exhibition reflects not only the history of these symbols but also the current times, as Forbes describes in her series of brilliant essays that accompany the works - “This exhibition has been made during a war in Europe, the death of my last living Grandparent and a string of devastating natural disasters at home and around the planet. The divisions in our communities post 2020, have had an effect of collective anxiety and distrust. Across all information platforms we’ve experienced uncomfortable proclamations such as good / truth vs evil / lies at a time perhaps when we need to consider a more inclusive and productive wisdom and guardianship centred on the planet’s future.”
