A looming landscape . . .

ARTIST Jean Loomis cannot be accused of being a high-maintenance woman.
For her birthday last year, all she asked of husband Terence was that he get the runabout they generally use on placid lake waters, launch it onto the open sea and take her around the gigantic landform that is Young Nicks Head: Te Kuri a Paoa.
It was, she says, a wonderful journey. The skies were clear and blue. The ocean like a millpond. The headland’s famous white cliffs gleamed in the high summer sun.
The thing the Tiniroto artist remembers most, however, is how upset she felt that this landform — the one that drew Captain James Cook and his crew to New Zealand, the one central to many stories associated with the local Ngai Tamanuhiri people — was in private hands. And not just any hands . . . those of an American owner.
In fact, she was so upset that she built on the research she had already started and devised a series of prints based on the headland, its history and the more general issue of overseas ownership of the treasures of New Zealand.
Now complete, the set of 12 photographic screen prints next week wing their way to Porirua where they will form Loomis’s exhibition Possession, to be installed at Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures.
But she reckons the issue of foreign ownership is going to worry away at her for a while yet, and may reappear in the show she has booked for Tairawhiti Museum next year.
While the new prints are fresh in their delivery — Loomis’s recent works have tended to be oil paint on aluminium — their content is consistent with that she has tussled with during the 50 years of her arts career.
She has, she says, always been interested in her physical surroundings and the stories embedded in the landscape.
And ever since one of her earliest teacher postings, to Samoa, she has had a natural inclination to delve into issues important to the indigenous peoples of the region.
Tiniroto and its surrounds is a region with which her own involvement is relatively recent. Though based in New Zealand since 1976, the Auckland-raised artist and her husband didn’t make the full-time move to the mountainous country until 2007, nearly a decade after they bought the property.
The pair had spent years travelling and working overseas but were primarily based in Wellington where, Loomis says, she found the notoriously windy weather a bit too much to bear.
“I already had strong feelings about this part of the country since the 1960s when I went to Tikitiki to take part in a workshop on Maori artforms,” she said. “There were people there like (master carver) Pine Taiapa, people of that calibre, and I had never forgotten it.”
So she and Terence folded themselves into her MG sports car and took to often unsealed East Coast roads, looking for a bolthole to which they could eventually retire.
They ended up buying a small property in inland Tiniroto, an area where locals further informed her work by regaling her with tales like that of Te Kooti’s Crossing on the Hangaroa River, which the notorious Maori leader is said to have used during his 1868 escape from pursuing British soldiers.
“When we moved here I didn’t really know about the area so stories like that reminded me that this land is not just a blank page,” she said. “Wherever you are, I think you have an obligation to find out what happened before you came along and to respect that history.”
In the case of Young Nicks Head — around 40 minutes’ drive from the Loomis’s home — it was the looming intensity of the landmark that attracted her to it (“to me it was unreadable, a mystery”), an interest further piqued by the protests of the early 2000s, when people unsuccessfully objected to its sale to a US businessman.
And she says she is grateful for the support of both locals and the Ngai Tamanuhiri Trust Board for helping her learn more about its history and its place in contemporary life.
Nearly a year after that birthday boat trip, Loomis spent a week living at Muriwai — at the base of Young Nicks — absorbing the power of the looming cliffs and, early one morning, climbing the mountainous flank of the headland.
“It took me nearly an hour to trudge up there with my camera and my sketchbook and I was feeling pretty proud of myself,” she says. “That was until I spoke to one of the women who lives there. She is 80 years old and she does it in half the time.”
What was important, she said, was that she was able to access the land at all.
In a Treaty of Waitangi deed of settlement signed earlier this year, the Crown vested in Ngai Tamanuhiri the landlocked Te Kuri a Paoa historic reserve, though the bulk of the headland remains in private ownership and anyone wanting to visit the reserve must get the landowner’s permission and a key to get through the locked gate.
Loomis expresses her feelings about that in a couple of prints that feature images of padlocked gates, of electrified fences, and of battered signs that bear the words “No Access”.
■ Possession, prints by Jean Loomis, opens at Pataka on December 15 and will be on show until January 26.