Here’s a glimpse of my latest exhibition at the Moray Gallery in Dunedin!
This exhibition forms a small forest of tree paintings. Over the last few years I have found myself uprooted several times. These are the trees that have grounded me. I hope you enjoy wandering amongst them. Thanks to friend and poet Kirstie McKinnon for this poem which came about after many visits to my studio over the months I was painting “Kahikatea:Goodwood”, one of a series of three paintings called “Beautiful Survivors”.
Kahikatea
- for Liz Abbott
The artist paints
a broken tree
sharp column spikes
daggers to the sky
this is how
we feel some days
lost to the backdrop
the wide blue
which aches to the edges
the next day she draws
an outline, fine grey strands
spill from the splintered trunk
a branch, another branch
this takes days
the moon rises, sets
each day she returns
now she paints
dark feathered green
the ink dipped tips
of the kahikatea
tender, deliberate
lift, lift
light drawn to leaf
roots sink.
(Page 39, “Songs from the Water” by Kirstie McKinnon, 2020. Limited Edition copy published by the author)
