Much art draws on the past, however innovative its means may be. But some is more specifically focused on it.
In a similar fashion to the way the heroics of nature, towering cliffs, crashing seas, are apt to put us in mind of the cosmic, or the sight of a woman with an infant evokes thoughts of nurture and the projection of life beyond one's own, so too, some motifs are prompts which bring the half-forgotten past into the present.
Stonehenge in southwest England is a famous example. Its great antiquity is obvious and the fact most people have little knowledge of its builders and purpose only adds to its ability to inspire not only awe but a sense of connection to people who lived beyond record in that place.
John Constable painted it in the early 19th century, making dramatic images of the "mysterious monument" connecting his present to that dimly recollected past.
Much of Constable's work is not like this but remarkably objective observations of the play of natural forces. But here he chose to use this motif which works as a portal to a time on the fringes of memory.
Ancient monuments are obvious candidates for works mining this rich vein, but plant forms and some landforms too can be used to similar effect.
Fujiyama, which figures so prominently in Japanese art, is not just a nicely symmetrical volcano.
Through Japanese culture, history and tradition it is a holy mountain, its base a training ground for ancient Samurai and a forest there is populated, by legend, with demons and ghosts.
These rich associations enable it to function in the same way as Stonehenge.
By international standards New Zealand is short of human history but the same great divide exists here between the relatively well-known past of written record and the much lesser known one of oral tradition, beyond it legend; both made remoter still by lying across a great cultural divide.
It's just that here the portal is nearer in time.
An artist who has worked at this interface is Russell Moses. He's been based in Port Chalmers for more than 30 years, a man of retiring disposition, whose work in several media has been consistently elegant, delicate and softly lyrical. It is also characteristically subtle, and like the man who made it, reticent.
Some years ago Moses made a stone waka at Back Beach, Port Chalmers. It has the outline of a Maori canoe delineated by stone blocks, resembling a petrified remnant only, the upward rim of a buried hull. You see it at low tide, and may wonder what it is, how long it's been there. But when the tide rises, it disappears.
In 2008 Moses had a substantial exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery called Garden of Light. There's a good catalogue written by Jodie Dalgliesh.
In the show there was a series called Whareakeake, the old Maori name for Murdering Beach, and among them a work, Behold the Moon.
The name is the first part of an ancient lament recorded phonetically by David Samwell, Captain Cook's surgeon on his third Pacific voyage, in Queen Charlotte Sound, in 1777.
The full line is, "Behold the moon glows in the night at Otago", which of course is a translation although, significantly, the last word is Samwell's exact, phonetic rendering of what he heard.
Moses observed this proves "local Maori originally referred to the region as `Otago', not `Otakou', as is often believed".
So it does and some readers will know I discussed this in a book I published in 1998, also called Behold the Moon, covering the contact period of our district's history, of which I am now in the throes of publishing a new, revised edition.
The poem refers to the baked head of a lamented lover, which seems mysteriously to anticipate the theft of a preserved Maori head by William Tucker who was killed by Maori at Whareakeake in 1817.
I had linked those events as probable cause and effect in 1998. But the 2003 discovery of the Creed manuscript proves that wasn't so, an important reason for producing the new edition.
We know significantly more now about this shadowy time although still, and more emphatically beyond it at the time of the lament's composition, we see only darkly, hear only echoes.
Moses' work still stands at that portal.
There was an immense moon the other night, a not uncommon phenomenon here, rising above the hills.
"Otago" anciently referred to the water near the harbour entrance.
The poem seems to evoke such a moon, rising above Taiaroa Head, Pukekura by its old name, meaning "sacred head", in a special sense of "sacred".
Moses has a new exhibition at the Nadene Milne Gallery, Arrowtown, in November. It includes further beautiful, meditative works - invoking different memories.
- Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
