PETER ADSETT
After decades studying Maori art, and that of central desert aboriginal artists, Peter Adsett brings new dimensions to his medium of abstract painting. He shares with the latter a technique of horizontality, working flat on the ground, since by this means he avoids looking at the world across distance, with a measuring eye, and thus achieving “good form” (gestalt), which he understands as a kind of picturing. Picturing, in turn, is the imitation of a model, an original, that remains outside painting, at a remove from the material object, the canvas.
Adsett’s tertiary education at Palmerston North Teacher’s College under Cliff Whiting, Frank Davis and others, also shaped this approach to his medium, as did his childhood apprenticeship in his father’s cabinetmaking workshop in Gisborne.
Furthermore, growing up in the vicinity of Matawhero fostered an early sense of historic injustices. In recent decades Adsett has dealt with the related massacres at Matawhero, and Ngatapa Pa (Matawhero, Bullet Holes and Bandages, 2009; Betrayal 2012), both exhibitions having been endorsed by Ngāi Tāmanuhiri elder, Olivia Horowia Bradbrook, before travelling to different sites in the North Island.
Text courtesy PAULNACHE
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