RMDH

Roger MortimerDilemma Hill

26 February - 21 May 2017 8 July - 2 September 2017

The map that is the territory: e ploring the art of Roger Mortimer- Linda Tyler -

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a

story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it

is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The

most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly

accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

-Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (2006)

Google Roger Mortimer’s name and you will disappear down a rabbit hole into a

tale of medieval manoeuvring. His fourteenth century ancestor, Roger de Mortimer, was

an English nobleman who was strategically married off at 14 to the equally youthful Joan

de Geneville. She later had the good fortune to inherit most of the Welsh marches and

Ireland as well as the 11th century Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. With this wealth behind

him, Baron Roger started the Despenser War, leading Marcher lords in a revolt against

King Edward II. Unfortunately for him, the attempt to overthrow King Edward failed, and

Baron Roger found himself chained up in the Tower of London. Helped by his mistress

Isabella, King Edward’s queen consort, he managed to escape to France where he rallied

troops to invade England and depose Edward, having him murdered at Berkeley Castle.

Three years later in 1330, Edward’s eldest son got his revenge, and Roger de Mortimer was

taken to Tyburn where he was hung without trial at the age of 43.

That story tangles with elements of Roger Mortimer’s painting: peer into the lustrous

surfaces of his early works and alongside the official-looking elaborately lettered

documents that look like royal decrees are scenes of internecine warfare, eternal

punishment in hell, beheaded figures, and much grief and sorrow over children,

marriages and money. Fifteen years ago the roll and bump of the ocean washed into his

work as well. It is there still, marooning populations on bits of coastline, mapping

territory familiar to both us and the artist. The ocean is usually shown as a blithe field of

azure; but sometimes there are patches of murky green, and often a sea monster or storm-

tossed galleon or two loom up from the water. It is all elemental stuff, and for some the sea

might symbolise the collective unconscious, that part of the human mind that Jungians

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believe is formed by ancestral memories of experiences. It is a strange coincidence that

translating Mortimer from the French leaves you with a combination of the words for

death and sea. What seems clear is that as well as being deeply personal charts of his

experiences and imagination, Mortimer’s paintings have the potential to resonate widely,

offering imagery and ideas with universal significance.

In the first part of this exhibition, works from Mortimer’s early exhibitions E-llumination

and Southern Collection Unit are grouped. MCXXIXMMCMV (2000) is titled with a

Roman numeral version of the artist’s phone number, and reproduces the page of

the Auckland phone book where all resident Mortimers, including himself and his

immediate family, are listed, with their phone numbers spelled out in Roman numerals.

Using the calligrapher’s font to copy out each name and number in blue and gold with

occasional lines of pink, the four columns assemble together like a facsimile page from a

medieval Bible. The letter M is historiated: picked out in blue or fashioned into a pink and

golden crown, sheltering tiny figures under its arches. Found images are recycled with a

twist: rather than acting as a framing device, the blue arches of the M which surround

the tiny copy of Charles Heaphy’s iconic Mount Egmont from the Southward (1840) (painted

when Heaphy was 19 years old and visiting Mortimer’s home territory of Taranaki)

seem to spout like paired plumes of water from out of the top of the pyramidal peak.

A longboat is recuperated from Mortimer’s Danish ancestry and rows in at the top left

of the painting, while an immigrant ship sails off at the bottom right. This antiquarian

aspect gets disrupted by the occasional modern motif: a blue Morris Minor takes a

family for a jaunt at top right while a robust perambulator is proudly wheeled across the

middle of the work. It is a lexicon of family relationships, with the particularity of each

name made difficult to decipher from the clots of medieval script. The phone book acts

as a symbol for the ease of contact in the modern age of telecommunications, yet by

copying its Mortimer page out in medieval lettering, family identities are both revealed

and concealed, hinting at knotty problems and tangled genealogies which confound the

easy fix of a quick call.

As an adult student taking notes in art history lectures or from books which seemed

incomprehensible, Mortimer got the idea of casting himself in the role of a monk in

a scriptorium, endlessly copying and illuminating to convey hidden meanings. He

treasured his own mother’s art history notebooks with their careful pen and ink black

chancery calligraphy and thought that he might tackle particular documents that aggravated

him in this fashion. Bills from Metrowater, demands from the Inland Revenue

Department, and his application to Social Welfare for a sickness benefit were all upsetting

documents, couched in a terrifying language of imperatives - you must pay, amount

due, arrears, penalties and interest will accrue – paper instruments of power wielded

by faceless authorities. It would be simultaneously amusing and incomprehensible to

render them impotent by laboriously translating them into codices of medieval script. In

Debit (2000) a list of transactions, mostly debits rather than credits, document dwindling

finances. Ironically the bank statement is rendered against the shroud of a dark green

background, despite the account being in the red.

Switching to oil paint from acrylic in 2001, he first copied an image of harpooned sperm

whales thrashing off the North Cape of New Zealand in the early 1800s, the era when

nearly a million sperm whales were killed and the species was almost hunted to extinction.

In the second painting in this series, Right whales surface in the foreground, herded

onshore by the advancing whaleboats. It is an apt analogy for how Mortimer felt as the

liable parent pinioned by the spear of child support payments yet estranged from the

children he had fathered. Lettered over the surface of the image as a continuous pattern

is the text from a letter sent by the Southern Collection Unit of Inland Revenue insisting

that more monies were owed. Words resolve themselves into legible configurations to

form a melancholy litany: new payment, starting on, maintenance contributions,

deducted from your invalid’s benefit, future and so on. Like Herman Melville’s novel

Moby Dick - which coincidentally was based on observations of a white sperm whale

nicknamed Mocha Dick in the South Pacific - the theme here is the metaphysical struggle

between good and evil.

The acrylic painting Kujira (2001) shifts the source material to a 10th century Japanese

whaling manuscript, kujira being the Japanese word for whale. The imagery shows

fishermen using harpoons to kill a whale trapped in the shallows, and then cooking

up the whalemeat. Considered a gift from the gods, a whale could save villagers from

starvation in winter and led to a cult, with whale-hunting still considered a crucial part

of Japanese life today. As well as dipping into Japanese culture, Mortimer recuperates

the appearances of the European whaler’s art of scrimshaw into his practice. Rather than

engraving into actual sperm whale teeth, for the five-part work Ha (2001) in the Southern

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Collections Unit series, he created life-sized dentiform ceramics which are arranged like

a votive offering. These are coincidentally shaped like eye teeth, the very ones that have

the highest value in idiomatic expression. Reading the dentally-inscribed images from

left to right reveals a narrative of courtship, marriage and children which is overlaid

with text from the official demands for payment.

Egmont Madonna (2002) is another toothy work with bite. This time a row of triangular

ceramic shark’s teeth, painted like the mountain in Charles Heaphy’s mid-nineteenth

century coastal profiles of Taranaki, assemble for duty in single file, with the central

peak decorated with a Madonna and child motif. A homage to the artist’s mother who

died in 1999, this work is lettered with the text carefully copied from the calligraphy

in her art history notebook. The work was originally exhibited with an outsized

floor sculpture shaped like a rosary and manufactured from ceramic versions of

benzodiazepine medication entitled Madonna of the Anxious and Depressed.

i’mmissingthatwhichiimagineyoucouldfill (2003) continues to use text as graphic imagery,

and is based on letters written to wife Gina when she was living in Australia. The pink

text is relieved by blue versions of the postage stamps affixed to each missive in a coy

rendition of the traditional colour codes for male and female. This evokes the concepts

of animus and anima, the male aspect of the female psyche, and the female aspect

of male psyche, as explained by the Viennese psychoanalyst Carl Jung: “Woman is

compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak,

a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between

men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women

the animus, which means mind or spirit.”

As well as referencing Jungian ideas, in its use of simulacra and copies Mortimer’s work

could be described as exemplifying “the map–territory relationship”: reminding us that

reality should not be confused with its representation. Polish-American scientist and

philosopher Alfred Korzybski came up with this label: "The map is not the territory",

he says, “just as the word is not the thing". Mortimer migrated his method to more

literal mapping around 2007, and these map works form the basis for the second part

of this exhibition. He began by importing those aspects of portolan charts which are

based on compass directions and estimated distances observed by the pilots at sea, and

then overlaying personal and prophetic messages. In The Science of Disaster (2009), a

propeller-driven Lockheed Constellation plane is airborne over a territory represented

in two modes: mapped, and as a landscape rendered Chinese scroll painting. Porpoises

leap where love is lettered, but the plane, a memento of the artist’s Tauranga childhood,

casts a sinister shadow shaped like a hammerhead shark. This portent is a reminder that,

in the artist’s view, the scientific paradigm that humankind has been operating under

might be dangerous, and that it is time to plot a course for a more wholistic approach.

In Tiritiri (2010) the familiar shape of Tiritiri Matangi, the bird sanctuary island of the

Hauraki Gulf where the artist’s parents’ ashes are scattered, is populated with alchemical

figures mixed with Christian symbolism like the Lamb of God. The sea is embossed with

both the name for the island, separated into two words so that it refers to plantings, and

the Māori words rātā and āta, the building and nurturing of relationships. A reminder

of the twenty-first century is the surveillance satellite which joins the gull in the sky,

hovering like auguries over the sea. Manaia (2010) has a dragon flapping over the surfing

paradise of the Mahia Peninsula, while Eclipse of the Fisher King (2011) puts the keeper of

the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend into play with a diagram of a solar eclipse over North

Cape, the exit point for spirits according to Māori. This latter painting is a reminder

of the superimposition of one culture over another in Aotearoa. Those planetary

observations that were the supposed purpose behind James Cook’s first voyage to the

South Pacific – specifically the Transit of Venus – were the alibi for a tacit agenda to

locate and map Terra Australis Incognita, leading to colonisation.

Other map works imbed meaning in the maritime. The Messenger (2011) depicts Mercury

Bay with the eponymous Greek messenger above the Sea of Friendship, while below,

the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan finds his Mar Pacifico or peaceful (Pacific)

ocean after the tumult of rounding Cape Horn. North Taranaki Bight (2011) etches a

grisaille Madonna onto the map in place of the mountain, using a broken surfboard as

the vehicle for the message. Cartographic imagery is strewn across the field of vision in

these paintings not in reference to place so much as to people: Mortimer has delved

into psychologist Carl Jung ideas about universal, archaic patterns and images which

derive from the collective unconscious.

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Archetypal motifs that Jung describes include the apocalypse, the deluge and creation.

Mortimer’s most recent series of paintings have deployed representations of the apostle

St John’s apocalyptic prophesy from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament.

St John the Divine had a wild imagination, and in medieval manuscripts his descriptions

were accompanied by equally fantastic pictorial embellishments. Christ as a sacrificial

lamb, and the Virgin crowned with stars standing on a crescent moon are two of St

John’s most famous tropes, but his narrative is also loaded with obscure allegorical

references and the symbolic use of numbers. St Jerome, who translated the Bible into

Latin in the fourth century, commented that the text had "as many mysteries as it does

words". Mortimer maintains the enigmatic quality in the ink and acrylic lacquer on

canvas Northerly Wind (2014). Using a manuscript source for his imagery, Mortimer puts

the diamond shape of the four red-robed angels standing at the four corners of the

earth at the centre of the composition. They are holding back the four winds “so that

no wind would blow on land or sea or on any tree”. Lettered over the blue background

is the word Hauraki, which translates as north-west wind, which blew in many raiding

parties to wreak havoc on Māori in Tāmaki Makaurau, as well as missionaries and

settlers from the northern hemispheres.

In his latest works, Mortimer has settled on imagery from the illustrations to a copy

of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a fifteenth century Italian manuscript held in the

British Library known as Yates Thompson 36. Symbolising the spiritual quest of human

life, Divine Comedy tells the story of Dante’s travels through the three realms of the

dead: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). Mortimer uses the

medieval representations of battles in hell as a metaphor, bringing the contest between

left and right hemispheres of the human brain into view. Responsible for incompatible

versions of the world, each hemisphere has different priorities and values. Calculation

and logical thinking from the left hemisphere are more highly valued than creativity

and the artistic senses from the right. The dilemma of the exhibition’s title is the

human predicament: it could be argued that left-brain thinking has blocked action

toward a sustainable future. Unless brought into balance by the right hemisphere,

the left will triumph – at the expense of us all.

Roger Mortimer was born in Mangakino, New Zealand in 1956. Since graduating

with a BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1999, Mortimer has exhibited regularly in

Auckland and Wellington.

His work was included in the Artspace shows Flesh and Fruity and After Killeen (2001) in

Auckland, Portraiture (2003) at Te Tuhi, Pakuranga, and High Chair (2005) at ST PAUL St

Gallery, Auckland.

In 2014 he was the Paramount winner of the Wallace Art Awards and subsequently spent

six months at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. His work is

included in public and private collections in New Zealand, Australia and France.

Roger Mortimer currently lives and works in Auckland.

Artist Biography

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Plates

Kujira, 2001 (detail)

Southern Collection Unit 2, 2001 Ha, 2001 (detail)

The Science of Disaster, 2009 Tiritiri, 2010

Dusky Sound, 2016

Port Nicholson, 2015 Spirits Bay, 2015 NY

Dilemma Hill, 2016

Bay of Islands, 2014

List of Works

MCXXIXMMCMV, 2000 acrylic on canvas 1800 x 1300 mm

Private collection

Debit, 2000 acrylic on canvas

1130 x 700 mmPrivate Collection

Southern Collection Unit 1, 2001 oil on canvas

430 x 700 mmCollection of Craig Anderson,

Auckland

Southern Collection Unit 2, 2001 oil on canvas 340 x 530 mm

Collection of K Nola and S O’ Dowd, Big Omaha

Kujira, 2001 acrylic on canvas

1200 x 540 mmPrivate collection,

Auckland

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Ha, 2001 china paint and wax on 5 ceramic whale teeth

Ranging from 95 x 75 mm to 160 x 75 mm eachPrivate collection,

Tauranga

Egmont Madonna, 2002china paint on ceramic shark teeth

350 x 3000 mmCollection of the artist

i'mmissingthatwhichiimagineyoucouldfill, 2003 acrylic on canvas

1240 x 900 mmPrivate collection,

Auckland

The Science of Disaster, 2009 acrylic on canvas1050 x 1350 mm

Private collection, Auckland

Manaia, 2010 acrylic on canvas1200 x 1500 mm

Collection of The University of Auckland

Tiritiri, 2010 acrylic on canvas

760 x 1015 mm Private collection,

Auckland

North Taranaki Bight, 2011 etched fiberglass surfboard and ink

1850 x 450 mm Courtesy of the artist

and Bartley + Company Art, Wellington

Eclipse of the Fisher King, 2011 acrylic on canvas

910 x 1520 mmPrivate collection,

Wellington

The Messenger, 2011 acrylic on canvas

1215 x 1815 mm Private collection

Northerly Wind, 2014 ink and acrylic lacquer on canvas

1400 x 2000 mm Collection of Nadene Milne

2726

Dilemma Hill, 2016 watercolour, gold dust, charcoal

and acrylic lacquer on canvas1400 x 1800 mm

Private collection

Dusky Sound, 2016 watercolour, gold dust, charcoal

and acrylic lacquer on canvas1860 x 3220 mm

Courtesy of the artist and Bartley + Company Art,

Wellington

Bay of Islands, 2014 ink and charcoal on canvas

600 x 650 mmPrivate collection,

Auckland

Port Nicholson, 2015 watercolour and charcoal on board

480 x 630 mmBarry Hopkins Art Trust

Courtesy Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato

Doubtless Bay, 2015 NY watercolour and charcoal on board

600 x 800 mmCollection of Gerry Hetet

& Jordan Draffin, Auckland

Spirits Bay, 2015 NY watercolour and charcoal on board

600 x 800 mmCollection of the artist

2928

Thanks Iwould like to thank the many people who contributed time and effort towards the

creation of this exhibition and catalogue:

Mark Hutchins-Pond, for all his efforts and care in putting this collection together, and

the staff at Pātaka Art + Museum; Linda Tyler, of The Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, for

her collaboration and writing on this project; Alison Bartley at Bartley + Company Art,

for her commitment; Richard Killeen for our weekly coffee meetings; and my family for

their ongoing support and robust feedback.

I particularly wish to thank all the people who generously lent their paintings and

ceramics for the exhibition and Aloysius and Eileen Teh and Paul Robinson for sponsoring

the publication of this catalogue.

Roger Mortimer

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Curator:Mark Hutchins-Pond

Essay:Linda Tyler Director, Centre for Art Studies The University of Auckland

Publication design: Stu Forsyth Artwork photography: Mark Tantrum pages 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22 Roger Mortimer pages 1, 16, 17, 20, 21 Publication printing: Service Printers

Pātaka Art + Museum acknowledges the generous support from:Aloysius and Eileen TehPaul RobinsonThe Woolstore Group Pātaka Foundation All lenders Bartley + Company Art

Image page 1: Dilemma Hill, 2016

Published on the occasion of the exhibition:

Roger Mortimer Dilemma Hill26 February – 21 May 2017

www.pataka.org.nzCnr Norrie & Parumoana Streets, PO Box 50 218, Porirua City 5240, New Zealand, Ph: +64 4 237 1511

Roger Mortimer Dilemma Hill8 July – 2 September 2017

The Gus Fisher GalleryThe Kenneth Myers Centre74 Shortland StreetAuckland Central

Roger MortimerDilemma Hill