Flight

In the early 1960s, Rita Angus was horrified to hear that thousands of graves would be shifted from Wellington’s Bolton Street Cemetery to make way for a new urban motorway. Angus was keenly aware of her Anglo-Scottish heritage and New Zealand’s 19th-century history, and saw both reflected in the colonial cemetery.

Angus visited the site regularly before and during the demolition, making careful records of specific headstones and inscriptions. A lifelong pacifist, she was drawn to a carved stone dove among the piled-up headstones at the demolition site. Angus sketched the dove in pencil, before including it in this work - her last completed painting.

Here, the dove takes flight over a composite landscape of different locations in Wellington: Island Bay’s boats, Mākara’s hills, and the cemetery’s headstones. It is a surreal image, with three horizontal layers united by the bird, which is at once weightless and dense.