Auckland (One Tree Hill). From the series: The Homely

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

‘The homely’ series is clearly the work of a traveller. Gavin Hipkins captured these images with a plastic tourist camera over four years throughout New Zealand and Australia, on the roadside, on day
trips and at friends’ houses. In some cases, museum dioramas stand in for the real world.

When displayed in its entirety, the series of eighty photographs is hung with the frames abutted like cells in a film strip and spans nearly forty metres. To absorb it you must walk along it, and in doing so you encounter a stream of images, some sunny, some mundane and some strangely menacing. There is no obvious narrative, and no apparent weighting to the images; a snap of a cat’s scratching-post has much prominence as a sublime view of Huka Falls.

‘The homely’ has come to be regarded as the iconic expression of Hipkins’ ongoing investigation of national identity in what he described as ‘the turbulent wake of British Imperialism’. At the time he produced ‘The homely’ and the related series ‘The next cabin’, 2000–02 (shot in North America), Hipkins was exploring histories of landscape representation, especially the way landscapes are depicted and used to create and communicate national identities. As he wrote in 2002, ‘New Zealand has a long tradition of landscape representation. Illustrations of idealised landscape helped entice my migrating forebears to make the long sail from Europe in the nineteenth century to a new colony called New Zealand.’1

The development of a contemporary Pākehā identity began in earnest in the 1970s and continues today. As many writers have noted, depictions of indigenous communities and culture are conspicuously absent from ‘The homely’, bar a weathered waharoa (gateway) in a Rotorua tourist park. This is deliberate, a way of drawing attention to the formation of a post-colonial identity. As curator William McAloon wrote, ‘Rather than seeking to correct those absences, The Homely deliberately heightened them, concerning itself with the activity of repression rather than its subject.’2

Courtney Johnston

1 Gavin Hipkins, ‘Notes on The colony’, in Gavin Hipkins: The colony, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 2000, unpaginated.

2 William McAloon, ‘Model worlds: A decade of work by Gavin Hipkins’, Art New Zealand, no. 109, Summer 2003–04, p. 60.