Haast Bridge

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

On New Year’s Eve 1969, a young Welsh schoolteacher disappeared while hitchhiking through the South Island. Jennifer Beard’s badly decomposed body was found nineteen days later under the Haast River bridge on the West Coast. Her murder was believed to be a sexually motivated attack and sparked one of the biggest manhunts in New Zealand history. Beard’s killer, however, has never been found.

At the time, artist Jan Nigro was working on series of drawings called ‘Encounters’ — intimate studies of the human body that focused on textures like wet hair, pock-marked skin or water droplets on flesh. Using drawing techniques like frottage, Nigro attempted to capture the sensory experiences of encountering the female body, through touching, looking and desire.

The publicity around Beard’s murder prompted Nigro to think more about the danger and vulnerability implicit in her work. Their gentle eroticism began to take on a more sinister tone, reflecting the potential fear experienced by women. In Haast Bridge, for instance, she paired the silhouette of a naked woman with a menacing set of eyes, creating a sense of dark voyeurism and impending danger. Areas of textured pencil shading recall the dirt, scraps of torn fabric, grasses and flowers found at the murder site. Nigro’s drawing does not specifically use details of the grisly crime, but evokes the sinister encounter in flashes and fragments. Haast Bridge troubles the tourist-friendly view of New Zealand, giving a dark psychological edge to the country’s beautiful scenery.

This work was exhibited at Barry Lett Galleries in 1970 with about twenty other drawings from Nigro’s ‘Encounters’ series. Newspaper critics praised the work, recognising the surprising power and grit of the modestly scaled drawings. This exhibition also signalled an important shift occurring in Nigro’s artistic practice, as she became more fully engaged with the feminist and body politics of the late 1960s and 1970s. In particular, works like Haast Bridge explore ideas about the male gaze, and how female bodies were negotiated within what she saw as the repressed and parochial Kiwi culture of the time.

Chelsea Nichols