Author Description

Exhibition catalogue for Songs of the Earth (1975-2021) shown at Pihama Lavender in Coastal South Taranaki, New Zealand in May 2021. It features twenty-eight works from two ends of a fifty-year period with works from 1972 to 1977 recreated and new works from 2017 to 2021 added. The works from the 1970s were created at Elam School of Art, Auckland and in the period after graduating, while the recent works were created in South Taranaki. The intervening forty years between 1977 and 2017 were spent developing the philosophical rationale and insights behind the art works. This led to a deep understanding of the mythic art of Marcel Duchamp by 1994. In turn there followed the first ever appreciation of William Shakespeare's brilliant nature-based philosophy from his 1609 Sonnets as the basis for all his plays and hence the philosophy behind all artistic endeavour at a mythic level.