Paul Hartigan: leading light

For more than four decades, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland artist Paul Hartigan occupied a distinctive place as an innovative figure in the national contemporary art landscape. He is widely recognised for the use of neon in his artworks, a medium that he used to transform the visual language of public art across Aotearoa New Zealand.

After relocating from Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Hartigan's career took shape at the University's then Elam School of Fine Arts, where he studied between 1971 and 1973. Upon graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he relocated to Melbourne to train in commercial screen printing at Summer Bros. Hartigan returned to Aotearoa in the mid-1970s and established the silkscreen printing studio Snake Studios. His early career demonstrates his interest in advertising, pop and postmodern art, developing his practice within an evolving creative environment that saw artists experimenting with conceptual art forms and theories.

By the 1980s, Hartigan was engaging predominantly with neon, using the medium to challenge traditional distinctions between fine art, design, signage and public space. He established Gone On Neon in 1982, producing neon artworks as part of his own practice, and for clients. Through the subsequent decades, he developed significant artworks that demonstrated the conceptual and poetic qualities of light, pushing the neon medium beyond a means of commercial communication.

Hartigan's monumental installation ‘Colony’ (2004) has notably been a hallmark of Symonds Street for more than 20 years, enjoyed by generations as one of the most recognisable public-facing artworks on campus and in wider Auckland.

‘Colony’ was commissioned by the University's Art Collection curator Michael Dunn in 2002 for the stark concrete facade of the Engineering Building atrium. The sculptural light installation comprises a cluster of glowing tangerine neon lines, which twist and wriggle across the grey architectural canvas throughout the day and night. Awarded Best Public Sculpture at the Metro awards in 2006, it has retained a distinctive allure and energy that has made the work a beloved fixture within the cityscape.

In both title and appearance, ‘Colony’ took inspiration from Hartigan's childhood memory of glimpsing the glowworm lights from below in the Waitomo Caves. Shaping neon requires bending hollow glass tubes with a blow torch and configuring their shapes while still hot. This technique was pushed to the edge in the creation of ‘Colony’, in which the neon forms resemble tight coils and scrawled, hand-drawn lines.  

Using neon enabled Hartigan to use the light as a sculptural medium, with the forms protruding from the wall and occupying the atrium space.

As once noted by art historian Associate Professor Linda Tyler: “Like any artist, Paul took into account the different heights and speeds with which the work would be viewed. From outside the building the neon had to shout out its appeal to pedestrians, motorists and bus riders who sped by, glimpsing it through the greenish glass façade onto Symonds Street. At more intimate distances, it had to murmur quietly to those who milled around it for classes and functions, while also looking down benignly on those assembled for speeches like an altarpiece in a church."

Several other examples of Hartigan’s work will take up long-term residence on campus alongside Colony, as part of the University of Auckland Art Collection. These include his punchy multicoloured neon ‘ARTSPEAK’ (1997) and early examples of his printmaking, like ‘Catalogues #7’ (1978) and ‘Silly Shapes’ (1978).

In his later career, Hartigan’s art making slowed in the stark face of a Motor Neuron Disease (MND) diagnosis. His wit and creativity, however, remained exuberant. His most recent 2024 series I Light was shown at Tim Melville Gallery, comprising a body of works jovially described as ‘neon on paper’.

Hartigan made a vast contribution to contemporary art in Aotearoa and will be remembered by the generations of students and city visitors for whom ‘Colony’ illuminates their quotidian. His legacy is one of wit, tenacity, art and light.

- Madeleine Harvey – University of Auckland Art Collection adviser