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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Like Gordon Walters’ The poet, Dennis Knight Turner’s Untitled (Fish and figures) illustrates the important role that South Island Māori rock drawings played in modernist New Zealand art of the 1940s and 1950s. Turner first encountered the drawings in several magazine articles generated by Theo Schoon’s project to document the rock drawings in South Canterbury and North Otago for the Department of Internal Affairs, and talked to Schoon about them while both were living in Auckland in the 1950s. The drawings were a critical element in the way each artist grappled with the pictorial concerns of the avant-garde in Europe. The result, as seen in Untitled (Fish and figures), is a kind of local modernism, sourced in the particular forms of Māori and Pacific art found in New Zealand.
There are differences between the way Schoon and Turner used the rock drawings in their work. While Schoon tended to create visual ambiguity by using parallel lines that complicate the relationship between foreground and background, Turner treats the composition as a series of discrete motifs stacked upon each other in a shallow pictorial space. The pattern of colour in Untitled (Fish and figures) demonstrates this nicely, creating a network of planes on which motifs can be sketched in black lines.
Notwithstanding their initial impetus, Turner’s paintings have been described as ‘a dialogue with a number of other Oceanic cultures’ artefacts and art works’.1 Turner emphasised this point when he exhibited the series under the titles Oceanic motifs, Oceanic masks and figure paintings and 100 Oceanic motifs in 1951, 1953 and 1957 respectively. Māori rock drawings are important to Untitled (Fish and figures) but this debt must be understood alongside Turner’s interest in New Guinean and Papuan art, for example. His sketchbooks reveal that such sources are also a key element
in his modernist experiments of the early 1950s.
Damian Skinner
1 Richard Lummis, ‘Dennis Turner in context’, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1988, pp. 43–44.
The Māori rock drawings of the South Island Waitaha people have been described by Ngāi Tahu archaeologist Brian Allingham as ‘genius art … with enormous scale and complexity’. Here, you can see the influence of those drawings on the work of Dennis Knight Turner.
Turner uses the abstract human forms as key motifs in this painting. But rather than leave the forms blank inside, as in the Māori renderings, he adds decorative touches, including faces and eyes, and a repeated spiral motif.
In creating works like this, Turner joined various other non-Māori artists who’d been inspired by the drawings since the mid 1940s. Theo Schoon, Gordon Walters, and A R D Fairburn were all incorporating elements of rock art into their work.