Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

McPherson, Heather

The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
unctures
14: peace
July 2011
Junctures is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 New Zealand licence 
(cc-by-nc-nd), unless otherwise indicated. Copyright in all images remains with the artists, unless otherwise indicated.
 
HEAtHER MCPHERsON 
Forgiving our father (iv) 
37Junctures 14, July 2011
HEATHER McPHERSON
Forgiving our father
 (iv)
They were charming, the old ladies 
on the boardinghouse verandah 
the time my father threw me out...
‘Yes yes you must, O do go to university,
It was the most fun I ever had...sliding 
down bannisters, ankle-length 
skirts flying...bumping on silver 
teatrays down the stairs...’
‘...and the professor wouldn’t call us
Ladies because, he said, if you’re in 
my laboratory you’re not...’
‘...and my fiancé killed in the Great 
War...’ and ‘there’s only one war, the one 
you’re born in, the one you live through...’
and shyly I offer up Great-Uncle Frank 
shell-shocked and deaf from the Somme
but knots in my head rang clamorous 
night sirens steamy railway stations and those 
bald fascisti skulls like Michelangelo
domes all over Rome 
and the gas mask in the toybox and jungle 
boots on the back porch and my father
limping down the hall
Do you only ever fight one World 
War is it the same does ordinary old 
war go on unstoppably
I finger her kindly sub-text
how before and after resistances
the wise ones will prompt you
into what to hold onto
October, 2011


English

Forgiving our father (iv)

May, Gilbert

The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
unctures
14: peace
July 2011
Junctures is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 New Zealand licence 
(cc-by-nc-nd), unless otherwise indicated. Copyright in all images remains with the artists, unless otherwise indicated.
 
gILBERt MAy 
Review: Nina Katchadourian, Seat Assignment 
(Dunedin Public Art gallery, 26 March – 17 July, 2011)
78 Junctures 14, July 2011
GILBERT MAY
Review of Nina Katchadourian, 
Seat Assignment, Dunedin Public 
Art Gallery, 26 March – 17 July 2011
Rarely can anything be discerned beneath 
the floods of criticism which the history of art has 
periodically levelled at Plato’s all too frequently 
quoted banishment of ‘the poets’ from the 
Republic:
If a man who is capable by his cunning of 
assuming every kind of shape and imitating 
all things should arrive in our city, bringing 
with himself the poems he wished to exhibit, 
we should fall down and worship him as a holy 
and wondrous and delightful creature, but we 
should say to him that there is no man of that 
kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for 
such a man to arise among us, and we should 
send him away to another city, after pouring 
myrrh down over his head and crowning him 
with fillets of wood.1
Most often heard in this passage is that “we 
should send [the poet/artist] away,” and that it 
is unlawful for such a one to “arise among us.” 
This reading is not at all unjustified: the moral 
and political grounds under which art is judged by 
Plato set the agenda for hundreds of years in the 
history of the philosophy of art. But we should not 
forget, as Giorgio Agamben has recently reminded 
us (and Nietzsche long before him), that Plato 
treats art with an extraordinarily high degree of 
respect.2 As is overtly stated, the artist should 
be worshiped as holy and wondrous, his abilities 
should be praised, and he should be showered 
in myrrh and crowned with ‘fillets of wood.’ More 
importantly, however, we should not underestimate 
the profound (subversive) potential that is here 
implicitly granted to art: it is somehow within the 
power of art, according to Plato, to drastically 
undermine the health of the state and disturb its 
pax domestica.
The myopic focus on banishment, however, 
cements and bolsters an interpretive framework 
where a dialectic of negativity reigns over a 
logic of exclusion: internal peace and stability 
are guaranteed through the expulsion of the 
problematic body. However, Plato’s passage says 
more than this simple exclusionary function admits: 
we should not just ‘send him away’ but ‘send him 
away to another city.’ Plato’s banishment is, in 
effect, a logistics of exile and transit (between) 
rather than a logic of exclusion simpliciter.
Although couched in a register far removed 
from the classical stories of exile and transit found 
in the Oedipus trilogy or in the Odyssey, Nina 
Katchadourian’s Seat Assignment is situated in 
the same liminal space of transit and exile into 
which Plato ‘condemns’ the poets, painters and 
other ‘imitators.’ In some sense a self-conscious 
exploration of the logistics of exile, Seat Assignment 
is a show whose work was made entirely ‘in transit:’ 
on thirty or so flights over the twelve months 
preceding the exhibition (including, importantly, 
the very lengthy flight from New York to Dunedin), 
Katchadourian “transformed her downtime on 
airplanes … into a period of artistic production.”3 
By no means the first to make the vicissitudes of 
the contemporary travelling artist the very focus 
of a series of work (think of Fischli & Weiss’s 
Airport series, or even Kippenberger’s works on 
hotel paper), Katchadourian nevertheless draws 
(or redraws) our attention to the very conditions 
of distribution (if not also production) of much 
contemporary art and perhaps even forces us 
(especially here in Dunedin, at the far (dead)end of 
any international artist’s journey) to question how 
much of the art world is a simply logistical equation.
Despite this being the first time she has focused 
on the process of the physical communication of 
bodies, Katchadourian is no stranger to the 
transport of meanings (including any handling 
errors in transit) of which information theory speaks. 
As one commentator put it, she is “a connoisseur 
of failed communication,” – Katchadourian takes 
pleasure in the small discrepancies in GRNAD 
OPENINGS and the hours of drivel punctuated by 
the occasional burst of significance which popcorn 
speaks when translated into morse code.4 The 
works exhibited in Seat Assignment and produced 
under her self-imposed and austere parameters 
(only use materials on hand and in-flight, document 
79Junctures 14, July 2011
only with a digital camera/phone) inhabit this 
same space of light-hearted irreverence. Lavatory 
Portraits in the Flemish Style (figure 1), for 
example, is a series of photographs which have 
the artist dressed in the apparent garb of the high 
bourgeoisie and merchant class found in Flemish 
portraiture, but the characteristic white ruffs and 
head-dress are made with disposable hand-towels 
and other items found on board and photographed 
with appropriately pious composure in the airplane 
lavatory. A two channel video work is made in the 
same style but here devout countenances are 
corrupted as faces begin to mouth the words to 
the video’s ACDC soundtrack found on the onboard 
music centre.5
Figure 1. Nina Katchadourian Lavatory Portraits in the Flemish 
Style (2011). Photograph. Reproduced courtesy of the artist 
and Catharine Clark Gallery.
If Plato’s main objection to art was its tarrying 
with the trickery of mimesis, it should be no surprise 
that the contemporary travelling artist ‘exiled’ to a 
life of inter-city and inter-residency practice should 
likewise take interest in the cunning of illusionism. 
Many of Katchadourian’s Seat Assignment pieces 
play deliberately with the indistinction of recursive 
representation: for example, laid out on her fold-
down table is a picture from an inflight magazine 
of someone skiing upon which she has placed a 
half eaten airline sandwich in such a way as to look 
as if the skier is being pursued by an voracious 
avalanche. The resulting photograph becomes a 
snack-food sublime. Another group of images plays 
on the seductions and hocus-pocus of advertising 
imagery through the selective and idiosyncratic 
documentation of images of ‘pure New Zealand.’ 
The pieces are photographed so that they capture 
reflective glare from the tourist brochure’s glossy 
paperstock, visually intimating occult emanations, 
supernatural light coming forth from idealised 
landscapes, or ‘lifestyle’ shots of the antipodean 
bourgeoisie. In another series, Katchadourian 
adorns images of native New Zealand flora and 
fauna with candy and other bits and pieces to 
create an entire ecosystem of exotic creatures. With 
names like Tic Tac Tui, Fruity Eyed Swallow (male), 
and Ornate Sugar Crested Penguin (see figures 2-4) 
the nature-porn of the inflight magazine is brought 
down firmly into the sphere of kitsch infotainment 
(the true genre of touristic imagery), and leads the 
ironic stance evident throughout the show at least 
some way down the road of critique.
Figure 2. Nina Katchadourian, Tic Tac Tui (2011). Photograph. 
Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery.
80 Junctures 14, July 2011
Figure 3. Nina Katchadourian, Fruity Eyed Swallow (male) 
(2011). Photograph. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and 
Catharine Clark Gallery.
Exactly how far down that road becomes a 
burning question the longer one spends with the 
work. There is the distinct promise of a critically 
reflective practice that would address the logistics 
of contemporary art: the ‘assignment’ which 
Katchadourian sets herself seems ripe for an 
institutional analysis of the ‘mobile’ artist, the short 
term residency, and the trade in the presence of 
the artist’s body and its phenomenology. However, 
despite allusions to a critical gravity, the works 
themselves seem terminally stuck in the oxygen-
light atmosphere of 80s ‘PoMo’ irony and their 
humour wears thin quickly. In an article published in 
the latest issue of MUTE, Anna Dezeuze addresses 
a similar kind of inadequacy and suggests there is 
a growing gulf between “the unbearable lightness 
of certain artworks” and the “loaded lightness 
of ‘precarious’ art.”6 In the financialised time of 
our post-Fordist contemporaneity, thoroughly 
unbearable analogies surface between what could 
once have been regarded as romantic artistic 
nomadism (valorised by dérive, some form of 
post-Deleuzianism, or even the modern epic) and 
the practices of what Zygmunt Bauman called 
“liquid modernity’s … nomadic and extraterritorial 
elite.”7 Dezeuze herself points toward a fortuitous 
homonym linking the 2009 George Clooney film Up 
in the Air, which follows the life of an inspirational 
speaker and hatchet man for deterritorialised 
capital whose weightless mobility charts a lifestyle 
of first-class airtravel and expensive hotels, and an 
identically named 2010 installation by American 
artist Tom Friedman which, she maintains, portrays 
the frivolity of contemporary symbolic capital 
without calling anything into question. In contrast 
Dezeuze offers the possibility of a ‘precarious’ 
art which maintains a certain gravity in its ability 
to call attention to the loaded stakes of the art-
world’s embeddedness in financial capital and 
perhaps even serves to subvert the metastability 
of the contemporary multinational ‘Republic.’ It is 
in the context of this distinction, its ambivalences 
and problematic overdeterminations that I found 
myself struggling with Nina Katchadourian’s all-
too-light-hearted Seat Assignment and desiring a 
more precarious and neo-platonic art capable of at 
least disconcerting pax neoliberalis.
Figure 4. Nina Katchadourian, Ornate Sugar Crested Penguin 
(2011). Photograph. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and 
Catharine Clark Gallery.
81Junctures 14, July 2011
1 Plato, The Republic, Paul Shorey trans. (Cambridge 
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), I 398a-b.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Man Without Content, Georgia Albert 
trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter 
Kaufmann trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 
104-105.
3 Aaron Kreisler, [Catalogue Essay], Seat Assignment, 
(Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2011), unpagi-
nated.
4 Nina Katchadourian and Ian Berry “Paying Attention” 
Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction, ed. Ian 
Berry (Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang 
Teaching Museum, 2006), 5-43.
5 Nina Katchadourian, Acca Dacca Dyptich, two channel 
video, 2011.
6 Anna Dezeuze, “The Light Years: Contemporary Art 
in the Age of Weightless Capital,” Mute 3 (1: 2011), 
http://www.metamute.org/articles/the_light_years_
contemporary_art_in_the_age_of_weightless_capital, 
accessed 13 June 2011.
7 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity 
Press, 2000), 13.


Review of Nina Katchadourian, "Seat Assignment" (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 26 March-17 July, 2011)

Labuschagne, Willem

Review of Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen and Elinor Ostrom, "Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice" (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Ballard, Susan

7Junctures 13, December 2010
SUSAN  BALLARD
Curiosity
Some things are best seen at a distance. In Eric Carle’s book Papa Please Get the Moon for Me 
(1986), a father silently obliges his daughter by building an enormous ladder on top of a mountain. 
Once captured, the moon slowly fades as its beauty is found to be contingent and relative. Carle 
introduces young children to different forms of knowledge; experiences constructed between the 
discoveries of Galileo and Kepler and tuned by the wonders of phenomena behaving badly.
In both art and science rendering things visible allows certainty and clarification. Plato implied 
that this relation between existence, truth and visibility was natural, and in the early twenty-first 
century we do not often dispute it. Photography was born of this need to capture, reduce and retain 
images. Recollection, if separated from an image, could lead to ambiguity or, even worse, forgetfulness 
and error. So when the photograph became confused with the truth, and seeing with verification, it 
seemed that the dominance of visuality would always remain. Making matter visible brings it into 
existence, and looking at it takes time. But this process has limits. The duration of vision means 
that often things move, change and transform before our eyes – as and when we are watching. As 
Descartes proved, our eyes are unreliable; a straight stick in water seems most definitely bent. In 
art and science other sensations come into play as the tools of mathematics and music (amongst 
others) suggest different approaches to the study of matter. Today, visualisation is not modelled 
solely on photographic capture; instead, scenes of continual invention, transformation and movement 
have become the media of the unseen.
The problems of visualisation were the catalyst for a symposium entitled Illustrating the 
Unseeable, which David Green and I hosted at the Dunedin School of Art in late 2009. At the time, 
we were concerned that our digital media students were limiting their activities to the service of 
representation, whether as 3D ‘avatar’ modellers or in visualisations for scientific projects (as 
one person said to me, ‘the art makes science look pretty’). David and I felt that there were other 
relationships to be explored between art and science, and that the time-based tools of electronic 
media could themselves offer some alternative methods for understanding the unseen. We wanted 
to uncover the various ways that the unseen might manifest without being visualised: as network, as 
private space or knowledge, as imagination, as sound. A selection of papers from this symposium 
are included in this issue of Junctures.
Extreme environments already exist on earth. The sufficiency of earth’s resources remains 
measurable yet unseen, and the need to pay attention is rendered more urgent each day. The 
death of eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April 2010, the extraordinary rescue 
EDITORIAL
8 Junctures 13, December 2010
of thirty-three miners trapped deep in Chile’s Copiapó mine in October, and only today the death 
of twenty-nine workers in New Zealand’s worst mining disaster for a century, all mark a peculiar 
interdisciplinary combination of technology, nature, work, and humanity. These events involve the 
unseen forces of labour and capital, and also point toward our responsibility to leave a living planet. 
They are key moments where the intangible is made tangible, and where people’s lives are changed 
forever by forces unseen.
There is another question though: are there some things that should remain unseen? After the 
visible excess of the industrial revolution, science turned to the unseen. Marie Curie measured 
electrical charges to trace sources of radiation; Ernest Rutherford fired particles at a sheet of gold 
to discover the structure of the atom; and Albert Einstein discovered the wave-particle duality of 
light. These processes used control, light and force to illuminate materiality. At around the same 
time Franz Kafka penned The Metamorphosis (1915), and the unseen became associated with fear 
and concealment. Hiding under his sofa to protect his mother from his image, the creature that had 
once held down a reputable job as a travelling salesman finds his life taking on a disorientating 
and menacing complexity. Despite his best efforts at adaptation, Gregor dies alone, a shrivelled 
damaged shell of himself. The hidden mental processes of the unconscious may also explain Gregor’s 
behaviour. Unearthing such experiences, Freud deemed the unseen meaningful. To see through the 
darkness was good, and offered a promise of hope and control.
Kafka and Freud wrote before the age of terror. Their works uncannily anticipate the mutation 
of warfare from direct physical and visual engagement to the hidden threat of unseen enemies; 
whether in the form of stealth bombers dropping warheads equipped with their own cameras, or 
distributed camps of disenfranchised young men hidden in mountain caves. The development of the 
searchlight marked the beginning of unseen warfare, and today eighty-eight searchlights are used 
in the place of New York’s World Trade Towers, as a memorial to the victims of 9/11. Illumination is 
one tactic to address these technologised relations between vision and light, absence and invisibility, 
representation and materiality. To approach the unseen in the early twenty-first century, we must 
deal with such extremity.
The first three essays in this issue connect visibility and representation via three very different 
approaches. Allan Smith introduces us to Leigh Martin’s speechless paintings rendered in noise. 
In the mobilised perceptual event of painting, movement is captured and, at once shining and 
vanishing, the image is made visible through the enactment of time. Tracing a detailed path, Smith 
marks the progression of fine lines of difference and similarity. Bridie Lonie triangulates the art/
science relationship through three modes of perception: representation, use and participation. 
These differing degrees of virtuality show the difficulty of cross-disciplinary practice that is truly 
participatory. Lonie’s engagement with the historical ideals and complexities of the art/science 
divide reminds us of the necessity for revisiting the model of paradigm shift as mooted by Thomas 
Kuhn fifty years ago.
The sun holds 98% of all matter in this solar system. David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s 
EarthStar uses a range of devices to bring that matter closer. The photoessay included here 
documents their research into frequency and sensibility conducted through a Hydrogen-Alpha 
telescope. Synesthesic approaches tend to conflate one sense with another; Haines and Hinterding 
do the opposite, drawing scent, image and sound out of frequency and vibration. Simultaneously 
moving toward the sun and turning us away from it, the perceptual energy of their research gives 
us tactility of vision. 
While Smith, Lonie and Haines and Hinterding all perform a focusing of the lens of the unseen, 
the next three essays introduce friction. Yuk Hui unpacks the implications of imaging control by 
9Junctures 13, December 2010
placing two contemporary worldviews alongside each other: the so-called computational turn, driven 
by networked ecologies, and French curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘altermodern,’ which has come to 
dominate the languages of exhibition. In Hui’s essay a map of a network that includes everything 
is read alongside an exhibition model that could encompass everything, via a worldview that did 
encompass everything.
Network technologies are given a different expression by Julian Priest. The Future Network is 
a prose poem that was first performed at Downstage Theatre in Wellington, New Zealand. Priest 
discusses the balance between planetary energy, information and entropy, and contrasts a future 
energy network based on renewables with the current fossil-fuel based energy infrastructure. In 
Priest’s poem, the Internet serves as a model for infrastructural change and provides a critique of 
existing energy provision.
Pete Gorman also voices the network. Tracing his own teenage investigations into earth batteries 
and what some call ‘rock music,’ Gorman develops a methodology for sonification of the electrical and 
telluric currents that circulate beneath the surface of the earth. The development of electricity, and 
its attendant need for safety and control, means that huge currents are fed back into the immediate 
surface beneath us. Without resort to ventriloquism Gorman performs his sonifications, introducing 
listeners to the affective resonance of mains hum.
The last two essays address both collaborative process and interdisciplinary communication 
dependent on shared tools. Rethinking supervisory experiences lead Margaret Pack to a theatrical 
model of multimedia presentation. Through the development of a set of scenarios, Pack encouraged 
colleagues to participate in the production of short video clips that give students a hitherto unseen 
direct experience of the intimacy of the counselling relationship. Technologies of reproduction serve 
to enable the necessary and safe distance between event and experience, but also contribute 
methods that allow students agency within the teaching environment.
Instruction in the details of a new topic often entails an encyclopaedic approach. Claire Beynon, 
though, uses the intensity of nano-scale microscopy to investigate unicellular foraminifera; creatures 
that seem to approach the world aesthetically. Beynon’s seven meditations are the result of personal 
and intimate communities formed in the particular environment of the Antarctic, an extreme 
environment where art and science must work together. 
This issue concludes with three reviews of events and experiences read in situ. David Green 
reviews the Illustrating the Unseeable art/science symposium by introducing a backstory of increasing 
technical sophistication in the development of the cinematic illusion and filmic suspension of 
disbelief. Cushla McKinney reviews one of a number of books published recently that address the 
artscience relationship and highlights the need to balance scientific and creative energies. Bridie 
Lonie reviews the NIEA HotHouse symposium where design, ecology, utopia and the material 
impacts of climate change contributed a complex agenda for cultural and aesthetic resilience and 
development.
The NIEA HotHouse symposium, like Haines and Hinterding’s EarthStar and Priest’s Future 
Network, remind us of scale and the importance of thinking very carefully about our next move. 
Where we look next will determine future behaviours, relationships and economics; inevitably it 
will teach us what kinds of matter survive into the next centuries. We are immersed in a culture 
of the visual. Leaving some things unseen is as crucial now as it was in the eighteenth century to 
bring them to light.


Curiosity

Haines, David

Hinterding, Joyce

33Junctures 13, December 2010
DAVID HAINES & JOYCE HINTERDING
EarthStar
Multimedia installation, HD video, single-channel projection from HD player, 16:9, colour, silent. Solar 
image sequences processed from Hydrogen-Alpha source, shot on location in the Blue Mountains 
NSW and Kellerberrin WA, July – October 2008; 
Live sound, from Custom VLF antennae, graphite and polyethylene-coated copper wire, audio filters, 
mixing desk and powered stereo speakers; 
Two Ozone accords consisting of synthetic aroma molecules including Helional (alpha-methyl-1,3-
benzodioxole-5-propanal) and Ozonil (tm) in a base of ISO E Super (1-(2,3,8,8-tetramethyl-1,3,4,5,6,7-
hexahydronaphthalen-2-yl)ethanone) and Hedione (methyl 3-oxo-2-pentylcyclopentaneacetate);
Peltier refrigeration units, glass containers with paper smelling strips.
EarthStar is an exploration of electromagnetic and vibrational energy.
The installation comprises three elements; a formal dynamic space is established between 
the singular and spectacular footage of the solar chromo-sphere captured by the artists using a 
Hydrogen-Alpha telescope. Sitting in opposition to this are two luminous refrigeration units containing 
virtual aroma compositions of synthesised molecules that represent states of ozone. Building 
a bridge between these two elements is a custom-built resonating and receiving system of VLF 
antennae monitoring the local electromagnetic environment and the effects of the solar winds on 
our atmosphere. This system provides a real-time, immersive soundtrack.
At its heart, EarthStar is an experience of frequencies: the frequency and wavelength of the 
light captured by the telescope; the multiple frequencies of the sun’s radiation channelled through 
the customised antennae; and according to certain theories on scent, the vibrational frequencies 
of molecules we experience as smell.
While the work employs the rigorous methodology and objective tools of science, its overall 
effect is to create a poetically charged experience that ultimately emphasises the elemental and 
mythic qualities of the sun.
Throughout Haines and Hinterding’s work, digital and analogue come together with the powerful 
but often hidden forces of the world at large. We sense, even at the fundamental level of felt 
vibration or smell, some of the stranger relations between the natural and technical forces that 
surround us. Any easy division between ‘natural’ and ‘technical’ breaks down. Instead, we are 
given access to the rich ecologies that arise between the force of manufactured signal and the 
‘electricity we didn’t make.’1
1 Andrew Murphie, “Joyce Hinterding and David Haines: High Res Resonations with the Milky Way,” ACM Computers 
in Entertainment 7, no. 2 (June 2009).
34 Junctures 13, December 2010
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36 Junctures 13, December 2010
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"Earthstar"

Green, David

Review of "Illustrating the Unseeable: Reconnecting Art and Science" Symposium, 28 October 2009, hosted by Electronic Arts, Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic Te Kura Matatini ki Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Sharpe, Kerrin P

65Sharpe – Waiting on an Island – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
KERRIN P SHARPE
Waiting on an Island for the Missing Balloonist
breathe the business of
memory from his clothes
build a cairn to 
detain his shadow
with the weta1  
plant harakeke2
phormium tenax
a shield from 
wind fire injury
weave a kete3
to feel close to the sky
your waking a 
kind of landing there 
will be time for feasting
the new net has gone 
fishing you do not need
a map or compass it is 
waiting that does the finding
Kerrin P Sharpe is a teacher of creative writing and a published poet whose writing 
has “re-flowered” in recent years as her family has grown up. She has been published 
widely in Best New Zealand Poems 2008 (forthcoming April 2009), the New Zealand 
Listener, Poetry New Zealand, Takahe, Snorkel 5 and 6, Turbine 07, Bravado 13 and 
The Press (Christchurch). In 2008 she was awarded the New Zealand Post Creative 
Writing Teacher's Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters and attended 
the Sydney Writers' Festival in May 2009.
1 Weta or wētā – a large insect found in Aotearoa/New Zealand
2 Harakeke – flax/phormium tenax
3 Kete – basket
POEM


"Waiting on an Island for the Missing Balloonist"

Cleverley, Peter

94 Cleverley – Sea Dogs – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
Clockwise from top left:
Figure 1: Bird Dog, 2008, acrylic and medium on canvas, 350 x 410 cm.
Figure 2: Sea Dog, 2008, oil on gesso on canvas, 640 x 765 cm.
Figure 3: Just Little, 2007, oil on gesso on wood, 335 x 555 cm.
Figure 4: Fortune Teller, 2008, oil on gesso on canvas, 350 x 410 cm.
95Cleverley – Sea Dogs – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
Peter Cleverley
Sea Dogs
In conversation, a friend, who is a vet, said to me, “one can tell a lot about the human animal 
by the way we treat other animals.” Recently I have taken to including dogs in the composition 
of my paintings; they stand in to represent themselves and all other animals including the 
human. My work has always created discourse on the ‘Human Condition’ but using a dog’s 
shape allows for a distinct visual impact.  Also, not so prevalent in my thinking but always 
there, is the history of imaging dogs for our own myth-making. I’m interested in how dogs 
have always associated themselves with people, (although they don’t need to), allowing 
themselves to be domesticated and work for us on tasks that would be quite impossible to 
undertake on our own. I want to remind people of what I will term as “all animal equality”; 
that every species has an important place in this world; that the human is no more superior 
and indeed has comparatively lost their connection with nature. 
The German artist Georg Baselitz, (b)1938, happened on a fresh interpretation of portraiture 
painting when he simply inverted the human head, actually painting it upside down, taking away 
the normality of it, the usual way we see it, creating for himself a whole new concept from which 
to depart. Also from Germany, the artist Jorg Immendorff, (1945–2007), sometimes included 
himself in his paintings in the form of a monkey, making his selfportrait unrecognisable, whilst 
he gazes directly back at the viewer. 
The impetus for much of my painting stems from paralleling an actuality, an experience, 
something witnessed or which I feel compelled to discuss, with a composition from my 
imagination developed via a plethora of memorised observations. This helps me defy nature 
to a degree, or at least to rearrange it so the viewer is confronted with something other than 
the usual way of seeing things.
Witnessing the McNaught comet as it was visible in southern space in January 2007 was a 
truly humbling experience. The discovery in 2008 of a “Black Hole” in space, thirteen million 
times the size of our sun is truly wondrous. I’m overwhelmed, it strikes me how infinitesimal and 
insignificant our existence is, how vulnerable we are, how humans in their vanity conveniently 
forget the tiny lifetime we have. I make three drawings and one painting with the title Just 
Little. Navigator makes reference to these Islands of Aotearoa being part of the Pacific group; 
ArtiSt’S PAgeS
96 Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
that there was no other way of discovering these but via the sea, both by Māori and Pakeha. 
Sea Dog pictures a dog’s head in profile floating in a sea of turquoise, contained inside a 
white wrought iron fence. This is a compositional structure that I have incorporated in several 
recent paintings after making drawings from the original structure that surrounded the Kurow 
cemetery in the Waitaki Valley. It can also refer to a border, a limitation or a protection, but 
mostly for me it’s because I delight in painting a thin white line through a dark colour field, or 
its opposite.  In the last one hundred and fifty years we have lost forever seventy five percent 
of our native bird species, sometimes called “losing three quarters of the ‘Morning Chorus’.” 
Bird Dog pictures a dog head shape detailed with an exotic bird and backgrounded by a native 
bush scene and waterfall. My Fortune Teller is a dog; after all they have twenty times more 
power in some senses than the human. However, I’ve never had my fortune told, I don’t think 
it’s possible, I don’t think we need such predetermining – each day as it comes for me! 
Peter Cleverley is a painter who exhibits regularly in New Zealand. He is also a lecturer 
in Painting in the School of Art at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Figure 5: Navigator, 2008, oil on gesso on canvas, 1860 x 1640 cm.


"Sea Dogs"

Schmidt, Leoni

7
Editorial
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
lEoNi SCHMidt
island
John Donne’s famous poem includes the still more famous “No man is an island, entire of 
itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore 
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” This issue of Junctures, on the 
theme of Island, focuses on that which is circumscribed by sea, yet richly collective, never 
without connection. Brisbane-based Pat Hoffie commences her article on artists’ residencies 
on Australia’s Peel Island – a former lazaret or lepers’ colony – by quoting from Donne’s poem. 
On Peel Island artists strove for connectedness with the landscape and with its particular 
histories, histories which remain dystopic despite their efforts. 
Wendy E Cowling responds to the writing of Sia Figiel (Samoa) and Celestine Hitiura Vaite 
(Tahiti) and investigates some of the effects of insularity on the work of these island authors. 
Through his visual art practice, German-born Markus Hofko presents a series of sculptures 
showing miniature snapshots of life isolated on floating islands, dystopias where living 
beings try to survive. Hailing from the UK, Andrew Grainger examines the cultural politics of 
race and nation as played out through physical culture and rugby: a sport in which players 
from the Pacific islands have an increasingly pivotal position internationally. He writes that 
the western understanding of islands, of their presumed alien and primitive nature, has 
important repercussions in understanding the relation between racial representation and 
modern sporting performance.
New Zealander Kerrin Sharpe’s poem included in this issue uses words like map and compass, 
net and fishing, wind and sky to evoke island experiences; while Paul Maddern – born in 
Bermuda and now working out of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast – 
stacks words and lines in his poem to a similar but also very different end. Based in Hamilton, 
New Zealand, Luke Strongman’s investigates the links which connect Captain Cook’s journeys 
between Pacific islands and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wellingtonian Mike 
Lloyd explores joinings and linkages in history between the different islands which form New 
Zealand. In South Island painter Peter Cleverley’s series entitled Sea Dogs, images float like 
islands in a sea of paint to become trophies pointing to the isolation of species doomed to 
8 Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
fail due to the hubris of man. Hubris is also a central theme in Sue Wootton’s creative fiction 
entitled Snow Kindness, in which Western notions of kindness and the ethics of a father from 
the island of Tuvalu come face to face. 
Nelson-based curator Anna-Marie White and a group of New Zealand artists contributed to 
an exhibition called Cold Comfort: The Craft Sublime through which the isolation of ‘craft’ 
within the wider arena of the visual arts is suggested by island-like elements within a larger 
installation. White entices us to look at the images where she writes: “This exhibition was 
constructed as a fantasy tropical island. Imagine that you have been shipwrecked in stormy 
waters, only to find yourself washed up on a colourful island paradise. While the island is 
a sanctuary, there are traces of human habitation but no one is to be seen. Who are these 
occupants? Are they friend or foe? In the face of the unknown, the warmth and colour of the 
island presents a cold sort of comfort.” Juxtaposed with these artists’ pages is Sussex-based 
Mandy Pannet’s poem, Passerine: a Quartet which evokes island imaginaries through its travel 
between contexts and the elegiac use of passer…passerine, which we learn are words for 
songbirds, songbirds momentarily perched on a branch before flying to their next destination. 
North Islander Pat White’s T Galatos: Those Who Came Home speaks of the brief lives of young 
men soldiers who lost their lives in wars on islands such as Crete and also in the Pacific. 
Calling the highlands of Scotland home, Jenny Holden contributes Power Cut, a piece of creative 
fiction, to this issue of Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue. The protagonist muses 
and reminisces while on holiday on an island. Being on the island provides a holding pattern 
for her memories, while danger seems to lurk within the confines of the island, danger which 
becomes patent in the last sentence of the piece. Again, the different functions of ‘island’ are 
manifest: it can seclude and contain, but it can also enclose and endanger through isolation. 
Also, the utopian and dystopian aspects of ‘island’ are both present, uncomfortably rubbing 
up against each other in this story.  
Visual images through which islands are created are contributed by Belgrade-born Nela Milic 
in her artist’s pages entitled Imaging Islands; while Otago-based Sarah Muller responds to the 
creation of an ‘island’ through particular editorial and publishing strategies in her “Survivor: 
Wom-po Island – A Review of Letters to the World, an Anthology of Women’s Poetry Written, 
Compiled, and Edited by Members of the Wom-po Listserv”.
Hailing from different ‘island’ places or focusing on ‘island’ experiences and metaphors, the 
contributors to this issue of Junctures all add to a rich layering of associations and embodied 
experiences aligned with the theme of ‘island’. The differences in approach evident throughout 
the issue invite the reader to broaden and reconsider any insularities which our own views 
on the theme may exhibit. 


Island

Smith, JD

101
J D Smith
the Golem’s Soul
It would break the legend’s clean line
to say how the rabbi 
stumbled in his incantation,
how an angel dropped     
a weightless package from the Almighty
and an essence entered the simulacrum
meant to be a man of clay
and nothing else, 
that spark wearing stolid flesh
long enough to see a self in the mirror,
soften a thick tongue into saying I 
until the confected flesh, a fabricated man
proved too coarse a sieve. 
Likewise passing through walls
among rooms of the synagogue
barred to tourists, the mislaid spirit
finds this corner of Prague, centuries later,
alien as the rest of the world. 
JD Smith has published two collections, Settling for Beauty (2005) and The Hypothetical 
Landscape (1999), and is circulating two other collections and a chapbook manuscript. 
In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the 
Arts of the United States. His first children’s book, The Best Mariachi in the World, 
was published in October 2008.
POEm
Smith – The Golem’s Soul – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008


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