Hastings Art Gallery column: Your artistic journey starts here – new exhibitions coordinator Mark Anderson

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The new Hastings Art Gallery exhibitions coordinator, Mark Anderson, introduces himself to Hastings Leader readers.

Earlier this month, I proudly took up my new role as exhibitions coordinator on the wonderful team at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga, Hastings Art Gallery.

On my first day after King’s Birthday holiday this year, I had just returned from a two-week visit to Japan. I was in a slightly jet-lagged fog when I entered the induction process, with a mix of excitable, first-day-at-school trepidation and a percolating sense of increased public responsibility.

I had been working at the Hastings Community Arts Centre around the corner, engaged in the grassroots exhibiting of our vast and varied creative community. I was ready for a new challenge.

Returning to my home region of Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay in September 2022 after 22 years of living in Japan was a middle-aged leap of faith that was sometimes both comforting and confusing in all its reverse culture shock and readjustment phases.

Not long thereafter, experiencing the unthinkable devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle was another stage of coming to terms with the reality of laying down roots in relocation. The mobilisation and community consolidation of reckoning with the immediate infrastructural, economic and psychological after-effects of this significant and singular event was a solid sign of the sturdy and selfless stuff people here are made of.

As a child growing up in Waipatu, my memories of the Hastings Cultural Centre, as it was then known, are few: the taonga-rich, echoey environs of the Holt Gallery accessed at the back of the library and the shell-shocked, larger-than-life Peter McIntyre mural all loom large in ’70s-toned memories from that time.

As loathe as I am to revisit the miasma of the disconcerting days of School Certificate art class, it was a class visit to a nationally touring Phillip Clairmont exhibition at Hastings Art Gallery that opened my eyes and cantilevered my impressionable teenage brain to the possibilities of what type of art can be created and exhibited in this country of ours – especially in a provincial satellite like Hastings.

Existing as I was then on a typical teenage diet of skateboarding, op-shopping, and mixtapes, Clairmont’s psychedelic fracturing of domestic trappings and countercultural signifiers all spoke of a spiked, bohemian reordering of the senses. Even if I had scant idea at the time of what that actually meant, I knew I wanted more.

A tearing of the staid fabric of genteel and stuffy parochialism, the exhibition provided a visual contact high and was literally a gateway stimulant into a new world of artistic expression and modes of seeing, being and thinking.

At this point, the Hastings Art Gallery instantly became a potent portal of life beyond the fringes, provinces, and confines of our conservative, sport-dominated society.

After inevitably leaving Hawke’s Bay for study and then travelling abroad, Hastings Art Gallery was always a touchstone on return visits to family here, and a sense of hometown pride always had me maintaining a keen eye on gallery activities from afar.

With the gallery’s recent direction, along with the increasing presence and proliferation of dealer galleries within the wider region, I felt Hastings was indeed well and truly on the cultural map, and it was something to celebrate and support. This tempered any uncertainty about the feasibility of returning to Hawke’s Bay.

The recent in-gallery performance and exhibition Kelekele Mo’ui (Living Soil) by Kalisolaite ‘Uhila are pertinent signals of the vital role the gallery serves, both within our local art community and a broader Pacific-wide dialogue.

The team I am now a part of is doing a world-class job of presenting exhibitions that punch well above our weight and position within the national art ecosystem.

In Uhila’s durational performance, where the artist was implanted in a fertile mound of local whenua, a two-way umbilical cord/lifeline was extended and exchanged between the artist and audience, talking of slow-growing enrichment, artistic nourishment, and relationships between labour, people, and place.

It is the staging of diverse, eloquent and engaging exhibitions such as this that make me proud to work for Hastings Art Gallery, and I hope that they will ignite the imaginations of gallery visitors, both local and from afar, and inspire our future creative rangatahi in the same way it did for me all those years ago.