54Hamilton
2019 National Contemporary Art
Award
Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o
Waikato, 3 August–10 November
DON ABBOTT
On a stormy mid-winter evening
Waikato Museum director Cherie
Meecham welcomed a sizeable
audience to the 2019 National
Contemporary Art Award. It is the
twentieth time that this event has been
held; its longevity is matched by the
generosity of the two main sponsors,
who jointly fund the $25,000 first prize:
the Hamilton arm of architects Chow
Hill and local law firm Tompkins
Wake. Representatives from both
companies impressed with succinct,
informed and entertaining speeches at
the award ceremony.
They were followed by judge Fiona
Pardington, who presented the main
award to Ayesha Green, for Nana’s
Birthday (A Big Breath), a paintingthat features the artist’s distinctive
cartoonish figures. Several generations
are helping a grandmother to blow out
the candles on an 80th birthday cake,
and it is a painted version of what feels
like a photographic moment: the point
at which all those depicted are about to
blow. Green displays a soft, empathetic
wit—there is humour in the repetition
of the pursed lips, the open eyes
and the puffed-out cheeks on each
of the faces—but also a profound
understanding of whakapapa and its
intergenerational threads: potentially
and conceptually infinite, yet here
celebrated in a distilled moment that
precedes the weight of joined breath.
It is significant that all the generations
are helping Nana with the task at
hand, and it is also important that the
flames of the candles on the cake dance
every which way; in this moment they
burn forever. Green has arranged her
protagonists in a circle pattern so that
they form a kind of choir—it almost
evokes the music video for Queen’s
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’—and with their
mouths all open, about to blow out the
candles, they are all singing the one
song.
Gina Matchitt’s flag-based textile
He Tohutono was awarded the runner-
up prize. Matchitt took the red ensign
(a red version of the New Zealand
flag), turned it on its end and laid
words over the top of it, like a patch:
titiro mai and whakarongo mai (see
me, listen to me) surround a large
unblinking eye. In this staunch work,