1/11 Since the revitalisation of feminism by the #MeToo movement, many female artists who were neglected by publishers & curators are getting attention they deserve. Miranda Art Gallery & Atuanui Press has published a book of Diana Halstead's drawings. I wrote the introduction.
2/11 Halstead's father was a minister in Sid Holland's union-busting government. Her whole life can be seen as a quiet rebellion against her background & upbringing. Disillusioned with life in Auckland's upper class, she spent much of her time with animals & in the natural world.
3/11 Halstead studied at Elam in the early '60s, but what affected her most were the journeys she took to Auckland museum's galleries. She saw the Nukuoro goddess Gawe (also known as Kave), which had only recently been liberated from the closet where she had spent decades.
4/11 Colonial curators considered Gawe a 'primitive' work of art, but she fascinated the likes of Picasso, Henry Moore, & Giacometti. Halstead studied the shamanic religions of the Pacific & North America, where humans fused with animals during sacred trances.
5/11 Halstead married one of NZ's best-known artists. But like so many NZ artists & mothers - Jacqueline Sturm, Anne McCahon - she had to play second fiddle in the r'ship. In the early '90s her marriage collapsed, & she produced the visionary images in Archetypes.
6/11 'They were an escape and a therapy' she recalls. 'I made them very fast. I did one every day. They seemed to already exist somewhere; it was as if I were summoning them. And the figures, the figures I drew, they seemed to be communicating, to be talking with me.'
7/11 There are hybrid creatures, cat-women, dog-men. There are fragments of bodies, organs & limbs & eyes, that might belong to humans or animals. Whales fill vaginas. Gawe's blank but strangely passionate face appears. Distinctions between the human and the non-human dissolve
8/13 In the 21st C scientists have become shamans. As they analyse DNA and pick apart the human body, geneticists and anatomists bend boundaries between human and animal, past and present, & remind us of the provisional nature of humanity.
9/13 DNA analysis has revealed that hundreds hundreds of our genes are inherited from other hominids, & also from bacteria. The strong, instinctive grip that newborn babies have is a vestige of the hold monkeys and lemurs took on the branches of Paleocene trees.
10/12 For two decades now Halstead has lived in a forest above the west coast of the Coromandel peninsula. She and her husband run a sanctuary for wild pigs menaced by hunters; sometimes they give refuge to pigs rescued from cruel farmers.
11/12 Pigs sometimes enter the house & lap water from plates on the kitchen floor. In her life, as well as her art, Halstead is testing the boundaries between the human and natural worlds. The drawings in Halstead's book can be see as a manifesto for a different way of life.
12/12 You can buy Archetypes from the Atuanui Press site: atuanuipress.co.nz/product/archet…
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