To hold this book is to realise a dream that can’t only be mine about Marilynn Webb’s work, to stroke the very lines she made. The hardcover soft with its raised cloud lines, an invitation to fold ourselves in. Marilynn Webb: Folded in the hills is a bilingual companion book to the phenomenal exhibition of the work of the internationally feted Ngāpuhi, Te Roroa and Ngāti Kahu artist Marilynn Webb (NZOM) (1937–2021) that is showing at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery until April 7, 2024.
The book opens with a poem by Cilla McQueen, capturing a particular story of Marilynn Webb in place in Durham Street. Her colours, her paper, her cat (Henry). Another poem by McQueen gave this book its title. Amongst the eighty stunning images made by Marilynn Webb between 1968 and 2005, there is also a Hone Tuwhare poem, essays by exhibition curators Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell, and Bridget Reweti in both te reo Māori and English and ekphrastic (art to art) poems by essa may ranapiri and Ruby Solly.
They tell about Webb’s printmaking practices, about the Arts and Crafts movement in Aotearoa New Zealand, about the place of whenua in Webb’s work, about the difficulties of practising as a woman artist in media still often overlooked. They show the breadth of community in, and around, Webb’s art.
Webb’s images are curated into four different, chronological plate selections. Plate Section 3 contains Webb’s Taste Before Eating artist book, a series of word/image combinations based on Aunt Daisy style recipes, devastatingly simple and achingly political love songs of sorts to landscapes and losses that readers of 1964 may find familiar – ‘Drowned Clutha Pudding’, ‘Aramoana Soup’, ‘High Country Flambe’.
I don’t know much about art, which is one reason I love the enfolding words alongside the images in Folded in the Hills. But one thing I feel about Marilynn Webb’s works is that they’re always more than the words that I can use to describe them. ‘Printmaking,’ yes, but so much more. Pastels, embossing, all the things. ‘Landscapes’, yes, but so much more. The feel of the land, the connection. What Bridget Rewiti recognises as “half a century of recognising whenua” (page 185). I’m obsessed with her recurring use of hands, for example, hovering over ‘protection work Lake Mahinerangi with symbols’ (page 83), ‘protection work dark poppy’ (page 97).
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Folded in the hills itself the work of many hands, to protect the work and world of Marilynn Webb.
Liz Breslin
Folded in the Hills was published in 2023 by Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
