Michael Hight / 4 - 29 July 2006

Michael Hight’s ongoing fascination with the beehive as a site for sculptural, architectural and metaphorical considerations, resumes with vigour in this suite of new works. The paintings, commenced shortly after Hight completed the Central Otago Rail Trail in 2005, depict beehives Hight discovered nestled within the unique landscape of the Maniototo, South Otago. Illustrated with photo-realistic precision - Hight’s thoughtful impressions of Maniototo’s local apiaries demonstrate the technical virtuosity of which he has become renowned.

While the paintings are clearly representational, Hight instinctively responds to the abstracted forms that reveal themselves in the texture of weathered timber and crumbling rock, by the formality of stacked boxes and frames or through the complex rhythms formed by undulating hills and fields of tussock. Look closer and the illusion of precision is flawed as such details are masterfully rendered through gestural strokes of pigment, which register the effects of light and pattern.

Traces of human existence populate Hight’s ‘hivescapes’, their poignancy reflected in all that is absent as opposed to all that is revealed. Hidden narratives linger among the remnants of industry - an axe left poised in a tree stump, worn boxes and frames stacked for retirement, an abandoned shed on the verge of collapse.

The melancholy that surrounds these 'leftovers' resides not only in their mundane object-hood but in the very demise of their utility. Combined with the noticeable absence of activity, the works reveal a crucial paradox which Gregory O’Brien cites is central to Hight’s work, where “…the immense activity within the hives is so comprehensively contradicted by the inactivity of their external appearance.” (O’Brien, Gregory, Michael Hight: Land of Milk and Honey, John Leech Gallery (Catalogue), Auckland, 2004.) One cannot help but regard the works as symbolic of the human condition.

Seasonal transition is evident and perhaps exists as an indicator of transformation. This time it is late autumn and the light is golden and the hills are dusted with the first inklings of snow. At one time, the plains of the Maniototo revealed a route through which early Maori travelled to collect pounamu. Eventually it attracted early European settlers eager to acquire large tracts of land for grazing sheep. This soon gave way to the excitement of the gold rush, its legacy surviving in the hotels, churches and gravestones of the surrounding area. Wedderburn, Kyeburn, Patearoa - some of the place names borrowed by the artist embody these narratives which define the region and whose layers of history are stacked like the hives Hight records. In them we are reminded that the passage of time is inevitable and so too the impending winter.