Koha 2021 - Recent Acquisitions

An exhibition featuring recent gifts to the Gallery's permanent art collection.

Image:
Gregory O’Brien
Night Train to Te Namu
2018
Acrylic on wood, metal and plastic
Collection of the Millennium Public Art Gallery
Gift of the artist, December 2020

My mother grew up on the northern end of the Taranaki town of Opunake. Her family’s farm encompassed much of the land that was once Te Namu Pa. Amongst her last wishes, she requested that her ashes be scattered beside the Otahi Stream which flows through that farm and past the headland that was once the main pa-site. Inside the cab of my toy train, I have stashed an imagined stretch of the lahar-strewn landscape which surrounds Mt Taranaki (and renders it a very unsuitable place for real-life train tracks). Shortly before my mother died, our Irish friend Patrick Higgins sang ‘Danny Boy’ in Gaelic to her —the inscription on the front of the train is that song’s title in the Irish language. The train incorporates phrases from my poem ‘Rocks, Te Namu Pa, Taranaki’ as well as details from my mother’s life: her nursing medals, vases, flowers... The work is dedicated to the memory of Margaret Rita Hickey (1927—2018). Gregory O'Brien.