Combined Cosmologies
The Art of Pauline Thompson 1942 — 2012
Curated by Peter Shaw
2 June – 27 August, 2023
Opening 1 June
Ground Floor Galleries
During the 1980s a series of fine exhibitions at Auckland’s Denis Cohn Gallery presented the work of a painter whose vivid colour sense and unusual subject matter ran counter to fashion.
Pauline Thompson, first exhibiting at the age of sixteen, had trained at Elam where she found herself somewhat apart from the prevailing current of modernism. After an exhibition at the New Vision Gallery, she was told by Colin McCahon that, as a woman denied access to the deeper things of life, she stood little chance of success as a painter.*
Undeterred, and determined to follow her childhood ambition, she continued painting. Marriage and children followed leaving her less time for work, however she continued filling notebooks with drawings and eventually took up watercolours, hoping that the medium would be less harmful to small children than oil paints.
Pauline’s background was unusual. As a direct descendent of the leader of the ‘Bounty’ mutineers, Fletcher Christian and his Tahitian wife, Mauatua, she hoped to be able to produce paintings that would enable her to reconcile the complex strands of her ancestry.
She saw connections between disparate phenomena and had a rare ability to see spiritual realities behind the every day. As William Blake, one of her favourite poets put it:
To hold the world in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour…
Pauline’s urban landscapes, many of them depicting familiar Auckland places, were suffused with the glowing pinks and blues of sunset; their strange perspectives were slightly alarming; their resonances both political and personal.
Later, she became fascinated with the extraordinary life of the French nun Suzanne Aubert, who as Mother Mary Aubert founded the Home of Compassion, Wellington. Some of her works on this subject are almost operatic in scale while others have a touching intimacy.
Pauline always remained absorbed with her Pitcairn and Norfolk Island ancestry. Deeply immersed in its Tahitian roots as well as its more recent history, she was one of the first artists to explore connections between the cultures of Aotearoa and the Pacific. Her visionary works of this period have been little seen until now.
This extensive exhibition, mostly drawn from her family’s collection, brings together all the various strands of Pauline’s work in a retrospective that will give her a new voice and justify continuing interest in the breadth and singularity of her work.
*“A Sense of Vision”, Quote Unquote, Interview with Keith Stewart, July 1986, p.24