Provenance :

Brook Gifford Gallery 1982 Carey's Bay Hotel Collection This painting fetched an auction record for a living New Zealand artist when it was last offered for sale in June 2002

During the 1970s, the small settlement of Aramoana, near Dunedin, became the proposed site for an aluminium smelter as part of the National government's Think Big scheme. A number of local artists and writers, including Ralph Hotere were involved in the No Smelter campaign. Cilla McQueen expressed the significance of Aramoana, which is just up the coast from Hotere's home in Carey's Bay: Apart from the physical nourishment of the cockles and mussels there, we both took spiritual refreshment and working inspiration from the beauty of that place... In 1975 Hotere produced drawings and a cover illustration for Ian Wedde's book-length poem Pathway to the Sea. An excerpt from the dedication in this first edition reads: Aramoana should be left to the birds fish sand-hoppers and denizens who at present possess it... Aramoana features the stencilled letters that first appeared in Hotere's paintings in the early 1960s. In this painting, the jostle of letters and parts of words are literally layered, this overlapping prevents a precise reading of meaning. Hotere also uses a recycled sash window frame, which Gregory O'Brien calls a material of the moment, a device that Hotere also employed in his Black Window works. A painting such as Vive Aramoana operates on one level as a direct political statement about environmentalism, but it doesn't stop there. In 1990 Ian Wedde wrote: Hotere knows about paradise, certainly, but very much from the point of view of what threatens it: war, French nuclear policy, the proposed aluminium smelter at Aramoana... The wider symbolism embodied in the threat to Aramoana, both as a physical location and a place of spiritual refreshment is an enduring theme in Hotere's work. From notes affixed verso