Age of Fishes

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

In August 1978 Richard Killeen liberated his art from compositional framing devices and produced the first of his innovative ‘cutouts’. These groups of painted aluminium shapes can be arranged on the wall in any configuration, thereby creating a sense of open-endedness and indeterminacy in the work. With each subsequent hanging, the form and meaning of the cutout alters through the changing relationship between the pieces.

Killeen’s interest in the way visual imagery operates in a social, political and gendered context has offered him innumerable possibilities for the cutout format. Using his own store of invented pictures as well as those gleaned from secondary sources including museological, zoological and botanical texts, Killeen has also employed an equally broad range of creative techniques to make his cutouts. These include hand-drawing, tracing, photocopying and computer generation. The cutouts have varied in type and scale, from tiny works stacked inside matchboxes to complex large-scale installations such as the two hundred and fifty-three-piece work Book of the hook, 1996 (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū).

Visits to the Auckland War Memorial Museum library generated the content of the thirty-two-piece Age of fishes, drawn predominantly from Egyptian archaeological sources. The work features a stylised selection of ancient earthenware pots interspersed with a variety of aquatic creatures, some natural (such as the squid and the seahorse), others drawn from fossilised specimens. There are also examples of mummified fish used by the Egyptians as victual offerings to provide sustenance for the deceased in the afterlife. Killeen’s interest in Egyptian burial customs and items associated with ritualised death led him to incorporate into this cutout an array of tools used in the mummification process, such as the clamps and pins used to secure the preserved body. Fish have been a recurrent motif in Killeen’s cutouts. They have appeared as archetypal images of death, rebirth, growth and timelessness, representing the idea of chance and inevitability, evolution and power, and the genetic links and interconnections between social groups in our collective culture.

Age of fishes is an early treatment of the subject. In 1991 the work was used as the title piece for a thematically related survey of eight fish cutouts produced from 1978 to 1989. The exhibition was held, appropriately, at Pakuranga’s Fisher Gallery.

Bronwyn Lloyd