The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.
- John Berger, “Why look at animals?” in About Looking (UK: Vintage, 1992) 7
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Since we began painting, people have always depicted animals. Warm, pigmented viscera daubed onto the rocks at Lascaux, Bhimbetka, and Altamira—bison, deer, and boar, still visible up to 30,000 years later. Many of these earliest depictions are hunting scenes, possibly forms of hunting magic, part of rituals performed to ensure a bountiful hunt and a safe return. Totemic images of cats, wolves, and birds appear in Egyptian reliefs—animals held sacred, their godlike status conferred by bestowing animal heads upon human figures.
By medieval times, hunting scenes were rare, as they played little part in Christian legend, while totemic depictions were considered blasphemous. Instead, images of animals were symbolic, each one carrying a message, with many still resonant to this the lamb, a symbol of humility and a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice. Indeed, the symbolic role of animals was so significant that bestiaries—illustrated encyclopaedias of animals, real and imagined, usually accompanied by a moral lesson—became extremely popular, cementing the medieval Christian belief that every part of the natural world was a manifestation of God.
In Fief, Alex Mcfarlane paints decorative depictions of animals drawn from medieval art and architecture: a sombre winged wolf, an ambiguous curve of horns, a stylised dragon-like creature sprouting crucifixes from the tips of its strange head. Displaced from their own contexts—Mcfarlane’s source materials vary from illustrations in books and images found on Tumblr to her own photographs taken while travelling in Europe—oddly cropped and rendered in textures and hues far removed from their original forms of metal, wood, and salt, these creatures take on new qualities. Detached not only from their animality, these are creatures unmoored from time, their medieval mantle shaken loose, no longer bound to the metaphors originally ascribed to them.
This ambiguity is inspired, in part, by Aleksei German’s epic film, Hard To Be A God (2013). Despite being set on a far-off planet, German’s film appears to take place in the Middle Ages, for the Renaissance never occurred on the planet of Arkaner, dooming its human inhabitants to perpetual violence and squalor. For Mcfarlane, the film represents the past meeting the future, something that also seems to be occurring in our present day as billionaires, multinational corporations, and tech moguls gain seemingly absolute power, mirroring the dominion enjoyed by the lords and sovereigns of the Middle Ages.
John Berger writes that what distinguishes us from animals – our capacity for symbolic thought – is born of our relationship with them: we turn animals into symbols, into metaphors we then use to make sense of an uncertain world.[i] Animals were the first metaphor. As the past meets the future, it seems likely they will also be the last.
Alex McFarlane (b.1996, Ōtautahi / Christchurch) is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a BFA (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2018. Recent exhibitions include Extraordinary Contact (Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2024), Nina's Dance and Tipping Rail (both Artspace Aotearoa, 2022) and Parakeets (Satchi&Satchi&Satchi, 2022). Her work has also been featured in publications such as Venomous Feathers and The Spinoff.
Text by Lucinda Bennett
In Blade Runner 2049, there is a scene where the protagonist takes a small wooden figurine to a vendor in a bustling marketplace. The vendor carefully examines it, using a machine to analyse its material structure in a manner reminiscent of how one might test a diamond. In the background, the sounds of voices and commotion from the street add to the atmosphere. After a tense moment, the vendor excitedly confirms that, yes, this figurine is extremely valuable—because it is made of real wood.
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The BladeRunner films are set in a dystopian future where Earth’s ecosystem has collapsed, and resources that were once plentiful have become scarce. There’s a sadness about the state this society has found itself in. At the same time, there is something intoxicating and beautiful about the hum of humans and machines that have overtaken the natural world.
Science fiction might seem a strange counterpoint for discussing the practice of a photographer like John Johns (1921–1999), but there is a thread to pull here.Johns was born in England and, once he’d returned from serving in the Royal AirForce during WWII, he joined the British Forestry Commission. In 1951, he immigrated to Aotearoa, where he joined the New Zealand Forest Service, initially working as a forestry worker. Thanks to his knowledge of forest management and expertise in photography, he later became the Forest Service’s first official photographer.
Later in life, Johns travelled to the United States twice to attend workshops with Ansel Adams, but apart from this, he was largely self-taught. His role in the Forest Service saw his work become widely published and gave him opportunities that were out of reach for most working photographers of his time. For instance, he formed a relationship with New Zealand Aerial Mapping Ltd., which led to him—along with instrument maker Geoffrey Hunter—being involved in the construction of an aerial camera, designed specifically for oblique aerial shots. This was the camera he used to make some of his most well-known images.
Johns’ soulful meditations on place and memory paved the way for descendants likeLawrence Aberhart and Mark Adams, and his use of shape and repetition was a precursor to some of Peter Peryer’s most iconic works. However, to the general public outside of the photographic community, his name is less well known than many of those who followed him. Along with Frank Hoffman, who emigrated to NewZealand from Europe, Johns is one of our most important modernist photographers. He was a technical virtuoso with a camera and in the darkroom, and there is something decidedly "form follows function" about the way he made images. Johns’ photos are documentation first and foremost; however, they are also explorations of line, rhythm, and balance.
Johns was a passionate environmentalist, and his photographs advocate for natural environments that need protection. At the same time, they also record the human relationship with the natural world in Aotearoa. Whether it is the fact that some photographs were taken from an aeroplane far above or that others feature rows of planted trees receding into the horizon, they speak to the delicate and precarious balance of sustainable living. That’s the interesting thing about his images: this tension is always there, always felt, even if it’s not pictured. A Johns image may depict a serene forest, but the whir of human progress is never far away.
This exhibition comprises photographs printed by Johns himself, which have been held in his family’s collection and have not been publicly displayed before. It features large prints of some of his most well-known images, as well as rarer, lesser-known works.
An evening preview for the exhibition will be held on Friday, 14 February, from 6–8pm.
Every artist recapitulates the history of art in their own manner. This process, however, is not an eclectic, grab bag, or random affair. Rather, it consists of constructing passages, relays and stopping points. These may relate to the different periods of the artist’s work, or they may consist of lifelong gestures toward and affinities with certain historical periods and the problems that survive these periods—certain themes and manners of the past that remain alive for the artist in the here and now. In this sense, particular geographical regions and their associated styles and lines of thought may retain fertile possibilities. The artist’s passages, relays and stopping points will often involve intense engagements with the work of another artist or school of art from the recent or distant past, including the associated philosophical, literary, political and scientific milieus within which they arose.
Many of my passages, relays and stopping points through the history of art are a recapitulation of the work on paper: watercolours, gouaches, drawings and collages, but I've found inspiration as well in mapping, kids’ book illustration, letter writing, architectural drafting, double entry bookkeeping manuscripts, cartooning and Japanese calligraphy, to name a few. On the technical plane, this has involved specific set-ups, materials and tools. Obviously paper as such, a concern for its vast history, its planetary travels from China to Europe via the Arab world, and today circulating absolutely everywhere. Paper has different textures, tones, hues, weights, rates of absorbency, etc. and all these different qualities interest me. But I have a fascination too for sable brushes, Chinese brushes, pencils and pens, conte and charcoal, rulers, set squares, stencils, French curves, drawing boards, certain types of paint and ink, and so on and so forth. And beyond the technical, my set-up also consists of singular items of clothing to be worn, certain stimulants to be used (or not), certain rooms, tables or landscapes to be occupied, particular times of the day and night in which I like to paint or draw, etc. and thus always there are rituals and rites. Making art is a kind of alchemy, but also a fetishism.
Unless one assembles and falls in love with certain materials and tools, certain assemblages of artistic erotica, as it were, then one is inclined to fall into an artistic void rather than projecting out across one. Today the work on paper is regarded as a minor form of artistic expression, not a major one, close to being a craft. After fifty years of an art-life, I’m happy to regard myself as a member of the Sunday Watercolour Circle.
—Ralph Paine, Notes for an Artist’s Talk
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Paine began exhibiting in the late 1970s. His history includes solo exhibitions with dealers such as Denis Cohn and Gregory Flint, along with a record of shows at culturally significant artist-led organisations including Teststrip, Artspace, South Island Arts Projects and Gambia Castle. He has also completed commissioned projects for many of Aotearoa’s major public institutions and has works in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Hocken Library, National Library of New Zealand and Te Papa Tongarewa.
