3 minute read
My Heritage Place
As told to Caitlin Sykes / Imagery: Sabin Holloway
Perhaps best known as a musician, Lyttelton-based Delaney Davidson is also an accomplished visual artist who recently spent a month as artist-in-residence at Stoddart Cottage. A Category 1 historic place at Diamond Harbour on Banks Peninsula, the cottage was the birthplace of Margaret Stoddart, one of New Zealand’s foremost 19th-century painters
Stoddart Cottage was built in 1860, which was just 10 years before my house in Lyttelton was built, so it has a very familiar feeling. I way prefer older buildings; so many things in them are more elegant and I think they’re just nicer spaces to be in.
What I’ve learned while being here at the Stoddart Cottage artist residency is more of Margaret Stoddart’s own story. She was really trying to make a go of it as an artist, but she also had to make a living, so she did a lot of botanical pictures – very detailed and realistic – and she had a real work ethic. She worked very hard.
That story rings a bell for me because there are musicians who have money and
are able to just do what they want. And then there are other people who actually have to make a living and go out and do the hard grind of weekly gigs. The hustle.
Reading those things about her, she becomes a real person to me, instead of some distant person from the past whose name is associated with an old house.
It puts the artist’s residency in context too – that there is provision being made for people to take time out of that daily grind to just explore.
While I’m here I’m predominantly working on local landscapes. I paint in the day while the light’s here, then when it gets to dusk I get in the car and drive these back roads –I’m out doing nighttime landscapes.
It’s interesting because the heritage places that resonate with me the most aren’t actually buildings; they’re rock formations and geographical features around Lyttelton Harbour like Te Tihi o Kahukura, Ōketeupoko and Te Pōhue.
And these hills around here, they have such a presence and power about them that it’s almost overwhelming. You can feel the history in these hills.
With the nighttime landscapes I’m creating, you can’t really see detail – you see presence and shapes – and I’m trying to capture the energy of that presence or the wairua of the place.
