The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Deadline (from 'Meditations' series) 1991 Oil on canvas, carved wooden frame (breadfruit) 45x31cm Collection: The artist NEW ZEALAND ROBIN WHITE Robin White was born in 1946 in Te Puke, New Zealand. She now lives in Kiribati . She graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1967. She studied as a teacher and taught at Porirua's Mana College, then from 1972 she lived in the South Island on the Otago Peninsula. In 1980 she moved to Dunedin. Two years later White established a vastly different home on Tarawa, Kiribati in the Central Pacific. She has since lived and worked there with her husband and three children. Robin White held regular solo exhibitions of her realist paintings and screenprints in Auckland and Wellington throughout the 1970s. She was the subject of a compre- hensive monograph, Robin White: New Zealand Painter, published by Alister Taylor, Martinborough, in 1981. Her prints have been s.elected for numerous group exhibitions including the '6th Biennale of Sydney', 96 1986 and 'My Head is a Map: A Decade of Australian Prints', Gordon Darling Fund, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1992. White's situation atTarawa was chronicled in the publication on which she collaborated with the artist Claudia Pond Eyley entitled Twenty-eight Days in Kiribati for NewWomen's Press, Auckland, 1987. From her art school days in Auckland, Robin White has consistently evolved a series of icon-like images of people and the environments closest to them. Meticulously crafted oils and screenprints of the 1970s centrally placed the subject in a familiar context. She portrayed her mother in drawings and paintings such as Florence at home, Te Puke (1976) and herself in the screenprint This is me at Kaitangata of 1979. The realist approach echoed that of the senior New Zealand artist Rita Angus (1908-70). Since 1971 the artist has been actively involved in the Baha'i faith and for this reason she and her husband left NewZealand at the beginning of the 1980s to assist the com- munity at Kiribati . The change of lifestyle argued against Robin White's former studio practice (which could accommodate large canvases and screenprinting facilities) and she turned instead to woodblock printing. A group of relief prints called Beginners guide to Gilbertese of 1984 conveyed her initial exploration and response to the new situation which led to the artist's book and associated prints Twenty-eight days in Kiribati. More recently the artist has produced small, painted canvases within wooden frames which have been incised with images remi- niscent of Gauguin's Noa Noa . They belong to a series titled 'Meditations' which were first exhibited at australian Girls Own Gallery, Canberra. In an associated letter of 22 May 1991, Robin White explained: My work nears completion slowly but surely. I'm working on the final carved frame. The carving is proving to be a real thrill-llove the way the shapes emerge out of the wood, the feel of them and their completeness ... Some of the images I've used in woodcuts reappear in these frames. A sort of reincarnation. Anne Kirker