Essay: Portraying Growth
by Francis McWhannell
Protection
While trilling, the skylark ascended steeply and rested in space as if on some invisible platform. I decided to view the experience as a tohu mana or good omen.[6]
When writing for an exhibition catalogue, one seldom gets to preview the installation. At times, one does not even see the actual works, only reproductions. The upside is that juxtapositions can present themselves that might not otherwise be obvious. Scanning the object list for Autonomous Bodies, I find myself lingering on two photographs with quite different tones: Fiona Pardington’s Choker from 1994, and Roberta Thornley’s Crying My Mother’s Tears (Meme) from 2010. The images are compositionally similar. Both are bust length. Pardington’s eliminates the upper portion of the subject’s head, leaving her mouth, chin, and a chunk of ear visible. She is unidentified and unidentifiable, save perhaps to someone who knows her very well. Her neck is ringed with bruises, ostensibly from a strangulation. The context is unclear. Has she been subjected to violence or are the marks the result of an erotic game? One cannot know.
Fiona Pardington, Choker, 1994. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Roberta Thornley, Crying My Mother’s Tears (Meme) Detail, 2010. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Install photograph Simon Devitt.
Crying My Mother’s Tears (Meme) is likewise marked by a measure of ambiguity. It portrays Thornley’s mother and was made after her youngest sister (one of five children, all female) left home.[7] I initially imagine that the title of the work refers to the artist’s own perspective; Thornley witnesses her mother crying and, being aware of the fact of the newly empty house, feels the sorrow herself. However, there is also a suggestion that Thornley’s mother is crying the tears of her mother, Meme, whose name is included in the title. The tears are fundamentally intergenerational, shared—both because family is a state of sharing, and because empathy is a common human trait.
Thornley’s mother is presented as physically as well as emotionally vulnerable. She is unclothed and unfiltered, marks of her age apparent. Her beauty is overwhelming, as powerful as her expression. The deep black background, the void space, recalls portraits of the Northern Renaissance by artists like Robert Campin (or so the theory goes) and Jan van Eyck. In such works, the subjects are depicted in great detail; the artists are at pains to describe every wrinkle, spot, idiosyncrasy. Idiosyncrasies define those we most adore. The portrait becomes a means of recording that which we know to be fleeting. A bruise will fade out, no matter what. A mother’s age will give way to her death. We do what we can to arrest the inevitable.
A mother–daughter relationship quietly underlies Jacqueline Fahey’s Girl Dreams from 1978. The work shows one of her daughters, Alex, then about 17, sleeping on Fahey’s grand, comfortable-looking bed following a night out. A mid-18th century painting by Pietro Longhi is reproduced in the top left corner. It shows a masked man cosying up to a woman, and points to Fahey’s sense of the vulnerability of her adolescent daughter. The prominence of the bed again calls to my mind Olympia by Manet (Fahey quotes him directly in her Luncheon on the Grass of 1981–82). Girl Dreams might be an anti-Olympia. The young woman is differently self-possessed. She reclines as she does for her sake alone. The bed is a bulwark, not a platter. The implied spectator is a guardian (a notion reinforced by the titular ‘girl’), not a client. Agency can take the form of someone staring back at you. It can also take the form of someone blissfully dreaming.
Jacqueline Fahey, Girl Dreams, 1978. Private collection.
Hariata Ropata Tangahoe, Anahera te pono (The faithful angel), 2008. City Art Collection, Wellington City Council.
Another work that suggests a space beyond the waking world is Hariata Ropata Tangahoe’s Anahera te pono (The faithful angel) from 2008. The eponymous angel kneels, wings spread, amid an array of gently illuminated pale pink clouds. Behind her is a heaven of hundreds and thousands paint strokes. Notwithstanding my agnosticism, I cannot shake the thought that they are souls or platforms waiting for souls to alight upon them. Anahera te pono has appeared in other works by Tangahoe. Her name recalls ngā Anahera Pono of the Rātana cosmology. The artist has described her as ‘a brown angel … trapped for almost all of her life by the Institution’.[8] Here, though, she is free. She has transcended the burdens of the earth, passing into another plane—where she is protected and, perhaps, protects.
Protection is an extract from the essay Portraying Growth. Essay commissioned by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata for the catalogue for the exhibition Autonomous Bodies, curated by Gina Matchitt. The full essay can be read here.
[6] Ngahiraka Mason, Five Māori Painters (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2014), 27.
[7] Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, ‘Crying My Mother’s Tears (Meme)’, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, accessed 1 July 2021, https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/2011-015/roberta-thornley/crying-my-mothers-tears-meme.
[8] City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, ‘The Faithful Angel’, Scoop, 8 September 2000, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0009/S00019/the-faithful-angel.htm.
[9] Felicity Milburn, Say Something!: Jacqueline Fahey (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2017), 44.
Roberta Thornley is an award-winning artist and photographer.
Her cultural heritage, early and ongoing enchantment with photography and involvement in sport have given her a way of viewing the world that influences all aspects of her work. They form the foundation for her storytelling in various mediums and across genres.
Roberta Thornley was born in Auckland. She received a prime minister’s sports scholarship to attend the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. There she studied sculpture, painting and photography. She graduated in 2008.
She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in both New Zealand and Australia and her work is held in private and public collections throughout New Zealand and internationally. She has won a number of prizes including the inaugural Auckland Festival of Photography annual commission, the Art50 trust funding grant and the Tylee Cottage artist residency, where she developed a body of work about a Whanganui teenage gymnast Millie recovering from injury at her seaside home in Castlecliff. In 2017 she was awarded the Marti Friedlander Prize for photography from the Arts Foundation.
Roberta has had a life-long interest in photography and an ongoing interest in the work of others. Her approach has been influenced by her relationships, a cultural heritage and education where the aesthetic experience was inherent and her life lived in sport.
In her practice she crosses genres and approaches – landscape, portraiture, and still life; from the staged to the incidental. She explores transformation and transition; states of change as well as evolution and development.
Her process is playful, exploring the shape and materiality of her subjects, building relationships, navigating landscapes. Yet play pauses when she takes a photograph and she is acutely aware of, and interested in, exploring this dialogue between play and the photographic act when she engages with her subjects.
Her work hovers at the leaping off point between still and moving image and she delicately occupies herself with the tension between narrative, time and the photographic image.
Roberta is working on a photobook that chronicles her time spent in Rwanda in 2015. She has a multidisciplinary research interest in aesthetics and is currently developing new commercial work. She lives in the Waikato with her 4-year-old daughter and partner.
Born 1985
Auckland, New Zealand
Education
BFA Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University 2007
Solo Exhibitions
Selected Works
Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2023
Through the Nautical Twilight
Laree Payne Gallery, Hamilton New Zealand, 2022
My Head on your Heart
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2020
Maternity Leave March 2018 — March 2020
Survey show: Round and Round
Roberta Thornley works to date. The Pah Homestead, Auckland, New Zealand, 2018
A Serious Girl
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2018
A Serious Girl
Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui New Zealand, 2017
Round and Round
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2015
O.E Travel 2014 — 2015
History in the Taking:Forty Years of PhotoForum
City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2015
I will meet you there
Tim Melville Gallery, Melbourne Art Fair, Australia, 2012
Anthem
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2011
Auckland Festival of Photography commission
Aotea Centre, Auckland New Zealand, 2011
Tomorrow
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2010
Spell
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland 2010
Spell
Stills Gallery, Sydney Australia, 2010
Idle
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2009
Pine
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2008
Selected Group Exhibitions
Peakes and Troughs
Conor Clark and Friends — Jonathan Smart Gallery 2023
Autonomous Bodies
The national portrait Gallery 16 September — 11 November 2021
On with the Show
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2020
Turn of a Century
Sarjeant Gallery 7 Sep 2019 — 9 Feb 2020
125: Celebrating women from the collection
Sarjeant Gallery Sep 15 — 17 Feb 2019
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2018
Aotearoa in Tokyo
Tokyo institute of Photography, Tokyo 2018
We Do This
Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2019
In bright brief moments
Demo Gallery, Auckland , New Zealand, 2019
See what I can see: Discovering New Zealand photography
Suter Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand, 2017 (Nationally Toured exhibition)
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2017
Ten Years
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2017
The Blue Hour
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Traits
Corban Estate Arts Centre, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2016
Three Colours Red
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2015
Now you see it…
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2014
Boys don’t cry
Heather Straka and Roberta Thornley
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2014
Saloon des Ferari
Ferari Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2013
Three Colours Blue
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2013
Sea of Fog
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland New Zealand, 2008
The Nathan Club, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012
Five Years
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012
Cruel & Tender
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012
Now and Then
Te Manawa Museum, Palmerston North, New Zealand, 2012
Everyday Irregular
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, New Zealand, 2011
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011
Game On
Hastings City Art Gallery, Hastings, New Zealand, 2011
Toy Story
The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, 2011
Another Universe
Calder & Lawson Gallery, University of Waikato, New Zealand, 2011
Deeper Water
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011
Uncanny Valley
Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2010
Paper Scissors Rock
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2010
Pretty Vacant
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2010
Melbourne Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2010
Black Market
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009
Auckland Art Fair
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009
Words&Pictures
Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2008
Aperitif
George Fraser Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2007
Portrait
George Fraser Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2006
Awards & Residencies
Mart Friedlander Award — The Arts Foundation, 2018
Tylee Cottage Residency, Whanganui, 2015
Art Five0 Trust Grant, 2013
Auckland Festival of Photography, inaugural commission, 2011
Collections
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Arts House Trust
Real Art Roadshow
Waikato Hospital Art Trust
Private collections New Zealand and Internationally
Books
My Head on your Heart — A petite booklet of text made to accompany the exhibition of the same name. Made with pages of delicate pink tissue. Edited by Jessica Kid and Designed by Joseph Salmon. 2020