All images by the artist are shared in our pages courtesy of the artist and Tim Melville Gallery
Star Gossage painting. Courtesy the artist and Tim Melville Gallery
…the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.
This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth…
Lorca, Garcia (1898-1936) – Theory and Play of the Duende
Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Ruanui artist, Star Gossage, embodies this force, both in her being and her art. She is carved out from the whenua where her tupuna have built homes and fires, grown kai, fished and created. In person and voice, to meet with Star is to meet with her whenua. Both are deep, generous, ancient and truly alive.
‘Pākiri 2’ 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Tim Melville Gallery
Moata McNamara: Tēnā koe e Star. Can we begin with the question of how you would describe your mahi to someone who has not seen it?
Star Gossage: It is emotion. ‘Emotionalist’ is just a word I made up. Mostly for myself when trying to explain to other people when they say “what do you paint?” or “what are your paintings of?”
I can never really explain properly and emotionalist was a word that fit for me.
The emotion may arise from a feeling I had somewhere where I felt something. Something that made me stop and stand back. Take a breath, and see something truly beautiful or meaningful and somehow it goes into my memory and stays there. Or parts of it.
Like if I’m walking up the driveway and I see all the shadows of the trees on the path with splintering golden light all splashed about, and flecks of silvers on the gravel stones glinting and red petals falling all at the same time off the flame trees above, and then wind blows and all the colours change.
It stops me in my tracks.
And sometimes I can get an overwhelming feeling of sadness and grace at the same time. Gratefulness in a beauty I can only admire. Even to try to paint it sometimes can seem pointless. So sometimes I choose to feel it more than paint it, and be like that gust of wind – fleeting.
And I see things with people, when they are laughing or crying or gardening, anything.
There is no particular time. But when I see something, I feel it in my heart and it can feel like an ache.
I know it’s a universal ache; a feeling we all get and it doesn’t belong to any of us, but we all know it. Ache isn’t really the right word. We recognize when we see it, but I don’t think it has a name or word.
Maybe that is similar to what Lorca writes about in ‘Duende’. It is expressed in the paintings as something you know when you see it, but you can’t explain it, but you feel it!
‘Marae’ 2013 Courtesy the artist and Tim Melville Gallery
And it feels deep, deeper than just a picture. Sometimes it can make you cry, and you don’t know why.
The process of creating the works with the materials carries the emotional memories too.
Then I think it just becomes how you are, in that river, that flow of nature and creativity, tapping into a stream we are all flowing in as pebbles rolling toward the same big sea.
You become emotionalist. I can’t really explain in words. Poetry gets so much closer to it. That is why I love Lorca so much. I guess he was the first writer I ever read that made me understand something I had no understanding of. Helped make sense of my senses. I felt like I found a friend in him.
A friend that I never met but I felt like I knew.
Deeply from another place and time.
Someone like me maybe.
Someone I felt deeply through his words.
And it moved my heart to that deep…
What a gift! How lucky we are to have artists. I feel so lucky for the gifts they leave us.
‘Ka Hikitia’ 2024 Courtesy the artist and Tm Melville Gallery
MM: Āe rā. And your paintings relate back to the whenua, either through what is portrayed and/or materials. Can you talk about your use of earth pigments in your paintings?
SG: I think it was when I left arts school and came home. I didn’t have a lot of money then. I used to get any of the old throw out mis-tint paints from paint stores. It was a time of real alchemy. I just made anything out of anything. That’s when I saw all the clays in the land here. And the colours are so beautiful. So I started reading about it and mixing them using different glues. And it is the most beautiful paint you could ever use. I didn’t really know about the whakapapa of Māori using it, but as I researched then that knowledge came in a s well. But it started with using what’s around me. I still use it. Not as much. I had a pause from it because I had used the same colours for so long that I had to change. But still always as under-wash.
MM: What does it do to the finished painting? Visually?
SG: It has a real soft, chalky quality that paint doesn’t have. It has a mistiness. Very gentle like chalks. Paint has more of a plastic feel. And then I can see things within it. Soft washes. If you stare at it you start seeing things in what’s left. It’s the softness that is really beautiful about it. You can’t reproduce it with any other paint. It hasn’t been adulterated. Tutu’d round with. It’s just pure in its own form. I’ve bought pigments, but some of them are so bright. I started researching how to make my own paints out of plants. But it started taking over my life. Instead of painting I just tutu’d around all day trying to make paints. The alchemy! I have a friend in Spain I met, and when I went last time she taught me how to make cochineal out of the beetles on the cactus bush. She showed me the pure red crimson. This is what started me. And she gave me blue squid ink. She paints with feathers. Beautiful work. She just sits and paints with a feather and all these natural paints. I showed her the earth pigments and we swapped.
My cousins from Ngāti Wai came down and showed me how to make the kauri black. Such a beautiful black. It has real whakapapa and depth.
Now around here, there are certain places that we know to go for pigment. My sister Aroha uses pigments all the time. Lovely work. I’d say to her “Go down to that corner by that Uncle’s and that’s where this yellow is.” And there’s an orange here and round the hill a dark green. You remember the places where they are. We used to get these yellow balls that would roll in and sometimes I’d find them down the river mouth. They were the yellowest of yellows. I say to Aroha “Oh, are you going to the paint shop?” She’d be standing on the cliff.
Recently I’ve paused a bit on the pigment, ‘cause I wanted to paint from Tahiti and there were different colours there. And a more purple light. So I just used washes of oil paints thinned down, but it doesn’t have the same depth.
‘Pathway of the golden hearts’ 2024 Courtesy the artist and Tim Melville Gallery
Light makes such a difference. The light in Spain is beautiful, especially where I go to stay in Cadaqués, which is where Dali and lots of other artists lived. I know why now, because when I was walking to do the mountains with some friends, there were flowers everywhere and the light is super clear. Maybe Dunedin has similar light. Crystal clear. Now that my baby has grown up I’m hoping to go back and paint in Cadaqués. That’s the plan.
MM: While we’re on the subject, can you talk a bit about Lorca. What has his poetry meant for you? And in what way does it show in your painting?
SG: I read one of his plays when I first came back from art school. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d read, and I threw the book in the bush and said “I’m going to do this play in Pākiri!” And all of a sudden there’s fifty locals in a paddock all dressed as beetles. But we did his play. Amateur theatre in a field. After that I determined to go to Spain. It was his poetry that made me go there in search of him. I would weep reading his poetry. I went to Spain, to his house and where he came from. It rained when I arrived and I cried. I knew that no one could see because it was raining. I had a dream, when I did the play, that Lorca came to my window and said “I’ll meet you on the wing of a bell.” I woke, not knowing if it was real or not and ran to the window.
There was no one there. And then one day, I was sitting in Cadaqués, with a big white church behind me. I looked and the bell rang and it looked like a hand waving. And I remembered the dream and knew I was in the right place. It was where he and Dali had used to sit. A lot of connections.
I guess my painting has a similarity to his writing in that both come from deep emotion. Maybe that’s why his writing affected me so much. Maybe it’s a mamae from centuries ago. Or an understanding of pain in some way.
‘Whai’ 2011 Courtesy of the artist and Tim Melville Gallery
MM: Āe. Cellular memory can be a strong call. On that note of whakapapa and dreams, ngā mihi nunui ki a koe, e Star. It has been a wonderful kōrero and I hope the first of many that we will share.
I am left with the lines of the woodcutter from Lorca Plays 3: ‘The play without a title’:
A spikenard can be a star or snow.
The sky at night a cloth in tatters.
Let the cricket sing or the wind moan,
The dream in one’s eye is all that matters.
No reira, e te tuahine, e Star, kia tīrama ai te duende i roto i ō mahi rangatira. Tēnā koe, tēnā koe, tēnā ra tatou katoa.
Star Gossage (Ngāti Wai / Ngāti Ruanui) lives and works, surrounded by whanau, on ancestral land at Pakiri, north of Auckland. She studied film and drama in Otago, making her acting debut in Barry Barclay’s The Feathers of Peace in 2000, but in 2002 realised that painting would be her career.
Gossage takes her inspiration from the coastal landscape of rural Pakiri, mixing local clay and ochres with oil paints to create the earthy muted colours that have become one of her signatures. Her emotionally intense paintings often feature dream-like tupuna figures who seem imbued, as Mark Amery writes, “with collected memory and ancestry … there’s no innocence in the eyes of figures; they feel soaked in both love and sadness. The pupils of the eyes bore through you as if demanding that their stories be remembered.”
Although Gossage has exhibited regularly throughout New Zealand and overseas, it was the ground-breaking and critically acclaimed Five Maori Painters exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, curated by Ngahiraka Mason, that cemented her significance as one of the most important Maori artists of her generation.