Art connects two women across three generations

What began as a summer research project on lesser-known female New Zealand artists led third-year Bachelor of Fine Arts student Audrey Goggin to landscape painter Rhona Haszard (1901-1931), who just happens to be her great-great-aunt.

Goggin’s solo show, ‘the cause of all the trouble’, opening on 21 July at the Elam Galleries in Auckland, is in remembrance of Haszard and "an exploration of how an identity is built, claimed and remembered, through time and place", says Goggin.

Haszard lived an unconventional life, moving around the country in childhood with her father’s job as a Commissioner of Crown Lands. She later attended Canterbury College School of Art (now Ilam), where she met other notable painters like Ngaio Marsh.

After a short first marriage, she ‘ran away to Paris’ with a former British army officer (Leslie Greener), where she briefly studied and later exhibited at the Paris Salon, as well as in London.

The couple travelled extensively in Greece, France, Cyprus and the Channel Islands before ending up in Egypt with Greener’s art teaching job. And it was there, in Alexandria, that she fell from a fourth-storey tower, which sadly ended her life the night after her last exhibition opened.

Goggin says the works in the show – nine oil paintings, a collection of 21 watercolour, pencil, ceramic, bronze and wood works, and a table made from rimu and reclaimed kauri – “honour and interpret Rhona’s life”.

“They’ve helped me begin to process what it means to bring her complex identity into today’s context. It has also helped me begin to untangle my own, with its inherent cultural tensions and differences.

“I grew up moving countries and cities every couple of years, and am of mixed-race, so my sense of identity and belonging feels equivocal; this is the root of my interest in themes of identity and why I’ve begun looking into my own ancestry.”

Goggin says she’s spent a lot of time over the past year examining Haszard’s work, learning more about both painting in general and Rhona herself through her brushstrokes and colours.

“It’s been interesting to see how my own practice has developed over the course of this project and the creation of the show. Rhona’s work is full of life; both vivid and subdued colours work together in decisive brushstrokes which reflect some influence from Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works she would have seen in Paris.”

She says her research and work for the show have offered her ways to navigate identity that she hasn’t thought of previously, as well as opening up more questions that she plans to address in her final end-of-year project.

“I realised a few months into this project that many of the works in this show depict and reference scenes or things that likely grounded Rhona’s identity. Where she’s from, recurring motifs from her life, the people she surrounded herself with.

"The title of the show itself, ‘the cause of all the trouble,’ was a line found a few times written by Rhona on the back of a photo and in one of her diaries. The phrase would have referred to different things each time she wrote it, and to me, asks where my complicated perception of identity may lie, and why. Which is what this show, with help from my ancestors, begins to help me figure out.”

While this is not strictly Goggin’s first solo show (that was earlier this year at Window Gallery in the University’s General Library), it’s her first with a substantial number of works and she’s really looking forward to it.

“It’s been in the making for quite a while now, and I feel honoured to be presenting the works in remembrance of Rhona Haszard’s life and work, as well as these works being the next steps in my ongoing exploration of how identity exists and is claimed; today and throughout history.”

The exhibition ‘the cause of all the trouble’ will be on show to the public from 22 July to 25 July at Project Space, one of the Elam Galleries, at 20 Whitaker Place, Grafton, on City Campus. The opening is Tuesday 21 July from 5pm to 7pm.

More details and images of the show can be found on Instagram @elamgalleries.