Artist Talk: Natalie Robertson

Natalie Robertson, Pohautea 1-4. 1995/2015. 3.25m x 1.2m.

ARTIST TALK BY NATALIE ROBERTSON

July 5, 2018, 5:30-6:30pm

Hawaii State Art Museum, 250 S. Hotel St., 2nd floor

Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhònnchaidh) is a photographic and moving image artist and Senior Lecturer at AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). Much of Robertson’s practice is based in Te Tai Rawhiti, her East Coast Ngati Porou homelands. Here, her focus is on her ancestral Waiapu River and the protracted catastrophic impacts of colonization, deforestation, and agriculture. As a tribal member, Robertson sees it as a responsibility to protect the mauri (life force) of the river. She uses photography and video to record the state of the river, surrounding land and to communicate tribal narratives. Drawing on historic archives and tribal oral customs, her research terrain and artistic practice engages with indigenous relationships to land and place, exploring Maori knowledge practices, environmental issues and cultural landscapes.

She has exhibited extensively in public institutions throughout New Zealand and internationally, including the 2016-17 multi-venue group exhibition Politics of Sharing in Berlin, Stuttgart, Waitangi and Auckland, and a 2014 solo exhibition Te Ahikāroa: Home Fires Burning at the C.N. Gorman Museum, California. Over the course of five years Robertson photographed for A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930, written by Ngarino Ellis, published in March 2016. In May 2017, the book won The Judith Binney Best First Book Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Robertson is also a member of Local Time (est. 2007) a collective which facilitates site-specific projects, honing in on local and indigenous contexts.