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Ralph Hotere: Fellowship

31 January - 28 March 2009

Ralph Hotere is an artist of international renown, a former University of Otago Frances Hodgkins Fellow and a celebrated Dunedin resident. He moved to this city in 1969 to take up the Fellowship and the exhibition features works that he produced during that year. Artistic collaboration and the fertile exchange of ideas between Hotere and recipients of the University’s Robert Burns Fellowship forms the basis of the exhibition.

Hotere has developed lasting friendships and professional working relationships with a host of New Zealand writers and poets who have been Burns Fellows, including Warren Dibble, Hone Tuwhare, O.E. Middleton, James K. Baxter, Ian Wedde and Cilla McQueen.

The Hotere works on display exemplify the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship’s twin aims of fostering an interest in the arts within the University and nurturing associations between artists and the University community.  Notions of collaboration and reciprocity underpin Hotere’s art, incorporating the poetry of Dibble, Tuwhare and McQueen and adorning the covers and pages of books by Middleton, Wedde and Tuwhare.

Through its Fellowships, Dunedin and the University of Otago have played vital roles in the nourishment of the arts in New Zealand. This exhibition demonstrates the creative opportunities that the city offers as well as the camaraderie of a particular group of artists and writers who all have connections with the country’s southernmost university town.

Costume design for 1970 production of J. K. Baxter’s Temptations of Oedipus at the Globe, Dunedin, 1970, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, Acc. No. 77/213, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago.

Last revised: 10 February, 2009