Recent Work

Joel Cayford

My background is physics, black and white photography, and too many years in local government planning. Since my retirement from paid work I’m enjoying life and fishing in Mangawhai, and occasional international travel keeping in touch with daughters and family in Europe. I’ve had seven photography exhibitions in the Mangawhai Artist Gallery.

This exhibition

Previous Mangawhai Gallery exhibitions of my photographic artworks include black and white urban landscapes, macrocarpa rural landscapes, Cuba Havana and Crete landscapes, and recently collage and digitally enhanced cabbage tree portraits.  

My 2026 exhibition has been inspired by my growing concern about changes in the world’s climate and weather patterns which I think are substantially caused by human activity including the burning of fossil fuels. I am also concerned by the lack of concerted action to change behaviours, almost turning a blind eye to what’s happening, as if a blue sky, a blue sea, and no flooding near my place, means everything is really OK. 

My exhibition is of photographic collages and images I’ve made in and around Mangawhai which confront and challenge what we see and what it means.  

Denis Bourke

The starting point for my drawing and painting practice is my fascination with land forms and terrain.

I have been deeply involved for several decades in looking, understanding and depicting the shapes and processes of land surfaces, with a special interest in the evolution of our physical environment, both physically and culturally.

Growing up close to Taranaki Maunga instilled in me an awareness that monumental natural presences can have profound effects on our subconscious and creative selves.

I am interested in iconic landform structures and evolutionary processes, as well as the evidence of human use and cultural occupancy.

My aim is to reduce and simplify the geomorphology to its essence, its underlying form which reflects its origin and is visually memorable.

Studying Physical Geography at Victoria University and becoming aware of the NZ landscape painting tradition, especially the work of Michael Smither, Colin McCahon and Robyn White, led me to painting the sensuous and earthquake faulted Wellington hills.

I use some of the visual conventions of topographical maps and scientific geomorphological diagrams to comment on the specialised way they are used to organise landforms and processes visually. The use of borders, numbers, letters/words, latitude/longitude lines, inset diagrams and legends comment on the measuring and quantifying of the land.

A recent development in my work is extending the idea of physical evolution and change to include the transformation of land and terrain by successive cultural land uses. Cultural patterns can overlay earlier traces of land use, and all human-driven change and modification can overlay the original geomorphology.

I am experimenting with transparent and partially opaque paint layers to achieve this palimpsest effect.

I work with acrylic paint on a variety of supports, including stretched canvas, loose canvas, hardboard panels and constructed wood panel, where the effect of joined planks adds texture and affirms the flat surface of the work.