Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

During the REAL New Zealand Festival, which runs alongside Rugby World Cup 2011, our Jock is roaming the country and blogging about it for the REAL New Zealand Festival Insider blog.

About four years ago I received an email out of the blue from an English photographer, David Matches. He said that he had read what I had written about rugby in New Zealand and was interested in exploring it as a photographic subject. Would I like to meet him for coffee? I agreed, and over the trim flat whites he explained his idea. He wanted to photograph footie players immediately after they came off the field to capture by their expression and demeanour what the game had meant to them. He explained that the idea came from a Dutch photographer, Rineke Dykstra, who had photographed new mothers just after they’d given birth.

Wellington No 8, 31 caps, Wellington 8 v Avalon 10

At the time I was involved with the New Zealand Portrait Gallery. I knew that under the inspired leadership of its director, Avenal McKinnon, and its programmer, Keith Ovenden, the gallery was trying to broaden the concept of portraiture – away from the formal oils of the rich and famous towards images of ordinary people in a range of activities. David Matches’ idea fitted this vision perfectly; and of course there was a World Cup coming up. I put him in touch with Avenal; and with an awful lot of hard work and help from others, the two did the rest.

Four years later and David Matches’ exhibition, The Match, is up in full glory at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Shed 11, on the Wellington waterfront. It is worth the wait. You enter a room of 100 large vertical images of rugby players. They are facing the camera. Most are taken from the waist up. The backdrop is plain white, which brings into relief the colour of their club jerseys which they all are wearing. Without exception they are carrying the scars of battle – mud stains, bloody cuts to lips or cheeks, large patches of sweat. Apart from a couple, all are solo portraits. They look strangely satisfied, but notably grim – there is hardly a smile among them. The catalogue tells us their club, position on the field, their number of caps, the date and the score – but not their name…

Read more on the Real NZ Festival blog…

During the REAL New Zealand Festival, which runs alongside Rugby World Cup 2011, our Jock is roaming the country and blogging about it for the REAL New Zealand Festival Insider blog.

Hollie Smith

Saturday was cold in Wellington, bitterly cold with winds straight off the Antarctic. Only in Wellington on a bad day – or Invercargill – can you feel this cold. I wandered down to the Courtenay Place Fanzone to hear Hollie Smith. She began by apologising for the weather. There were no more than 5o people huddling in doorways listening to her powerful voice. It was not a good start to Wellington’s big quarter final weekend.

The liveliest places, because they were the warmest, were the pubs - the Welsh Dragon Bar in Courtenay Place splendid with its red doors, Molly Malone’s all decked out in green, but even the Irish fans inside were not in quite such a jovial voice as I had heard in Rotorua. Perhaps they knew what was coming.

Plenty of green, and some red, at the stadium

I had backed the Irish, partly because I liked the fact that the Irish rugby team are a united Ireland team and partly because as one Kiwi mentioned to me, ‘All of us have some Irish in us, don’t we?’ Certainly in the 19th century about 20% of the immigrants from the old world were from Ireland; while under 1% were Welsh. The game was tight, competitive and enjoyable; but it was cold.

Where to watch the next game - endure the freeze and watch it on the big screen in the Fanzone beside the changing lights of illuma; or endure the crush of bodies and try to watch in a pub? In the end we made our way to the town hall where there was no alcohol, but warm coffee and a big screen…

Read more on the Real NZ Festival blog…

During the REAL New Zealand Festival, which runs alongside Rugby World Cup 2011, our Jock is roaming the country and blogging about it for the REAL New Zealand Festival Insider blog.

A moment of panic as I woke. Was I late? I lent over to flick on the torch. Yes, time to get up. I went to the bathroom and relaxed for a few precious seconds in the warm even flow of the satin-jet shower head while enjoying the Dave Kent poster on the wall. I raced to the kitchen and put some toast in the toaster. Damn! I knocked the tin of muesli on the floor. No worries. The neat dust-pan and broom did the job. Just time for a quick minute to check the e-mails while I sat on my oh-so-comfy Formway chair. Then the taxi was there – I was off again on the REAL New Zealand Festival road trip.

What made this scenario survivable was that all the items I encountered on this early morning journey worked and were well-designed; and all, believe it or not, were creations of graduates from the Massey University College of Creative Arts or its predecessors.

Old School New School at Massey

To mark the 125th anniversary of the establishment of Wellington’s first School of Design under Arthur Riley in 1886, Massey and the REAL New Zealand Festival have combined to put together a fascinating exhibition in the main hall of the old museum building at Buckle Street, Wellington.

‘Old School New School’ surveys the work of the school’s graduates. It is surprisingly wide-ranging. In some ways the most intriguing aspect are those pieces of industrial design which surround us everyday and make our early morning panics survivable - torches, toasters, chairs…

Read more on the Real NZ Festival blog…

During the REAL New Zealand Festival, which runs alongside Rugby World Cup 2011, our Jock is roaming the country and blogging about it for the REAL New Zealand Festival Insider blog.

The REAL New Zealand Festival is buzzing from one end of the country to another, but if anywhere is its centre, then that place must be Auckland’s Queens Wharf. Over the past 24 hours I returned there and began to ponder the question: just who is the festival’s audience? The assumption with which I began this journey was that the Festival was primarily set up to give rugby fans from overseas an interesting taste of Kiwi.

NZ On Screen's container

So when I first saw the New Zealand On Screen container installation I wondered if it had misjudged its audience. As you approach the wonderfully painted container, the come-on blurb is ‘a celebration of Kiwi spirit and identity as seen on screen’ – so far so good. Then we get: ‘from Pork Pie to Boy; from Gloss to Billy T; from Hillary and Snell to Dagg, the Topps, the Wests, Warriors, Whale Riders and Fastest Indians.’ Anyone who has lived in New Zealand and watched TV or gone to the movies will get the references – but would a French woman or a Springbok man have the slightest clue who was Billy T or Dagg or the Wests?

Anxiety was heightened when I entered and was faced by three screens which played short (2–20 second) clips from local films organised around interesting and appropriate headings such as ‘Home, land and sea’ and ‘Heroes and icons’. They worked successfully for me because I could fill in the context and remembered the films. Before long I was bathing blissfully in nostalgia and memory.

Read more on the Real NZ Festival blog…

During the REAL New Zealand Festival, which runs alongside Rugby World Cup 2011, our Jock is roaming the country and blogging about it for the REAL New Zealand Festival Insider blog.

'Flower chandelier' by Choi Jeong Hwa

The first thing you see as you enter the re-opened Auckland Art Gallery, its opening timed for the cup, are huge exuberantly coloured inflatable flowers which hang from the exquisite laminated kauri roof. ‘Flower chandelier’ is a commissioned work by Choi Jeong Hwa, described as the ‘bad boy of Korean art’. The roof was made locally from our greatest native tree, but the design has echoes of a European Gothic cathedral. This conversation between the wider world and the New Zealand environment is the theme of the new gallery; and since the World Cup has brought the world to New Zealand such a theme is of immediate interest to any visitor. Whether the large number of patrons were cup fans, I am unsure. The gender ratio – heavily female – suggested not; or perhaps they were World Cup widows. Whatever. One of the great advantages of the new gallery is that they allow you take photos – without a flash – so join me in this pictorial journey.

Luc Peire, 'Environment III

The exhibitions are beautifully balanced between the international and the local. There are galleries on both ‘historic’ (pre-1900) and ‘contemporary’ (post 1900) New Zealand and international art. I made a beeline for ‘international contemporary’. Here is a typical piece of optical art which could be from any country in the last 40 years. Fun all the same.

Immediately the neat geographical categories start to disintegrate. ‘International contemporary’ includes a fine work by Len Lye, New Zealand-born but London and New York based, and a video of paint dripping is by another Kiwi based in Melbourne, Daniel Von Sturmer. But ‘why is this international, but McCahon is not?’, you ask.

So lets explore the New Zealand offerings to see if we can find out…

Read more on the Real NZ Festival blog…