Our First Contact project has been launched, 250 years to the day after James Cook set sail from Plymouth, with an exhibition of extraordinary works by John Walsh, Gerda Leenards, Nigel Brown and Graham Bennett – the first in a major series. It’s a project that has a life of its own: eighteen months ago we began taking prominent artists out to Meretoto (Ship Cove) in Tōtaranui/Queen Charlotte Sound, inviting them to find their own responses to this place of significance as New Zealand begins commemoration of 250 years since first contact between Māori and Cook. It’s an extraordinary place, isolated, a sense of past overlaying present, which imbues the work produced to date. The artists challenge viewpoint, identity, memory. Shifts of light, shadow and perspective…what is legend and what is history?
Already we’ve hosted a dozen painters, printmakers, photographers and sculptors, and more will visit this summer. We will stage a series of exhibitions over the next two years, featuring some of NZ’s most prominent artists, and aim to bring them together in 2020, the 250th anniversary of the first encounters actually at Ship Cove.