In transit : questions of home & belonging in New Zealand art

Abstract

This essay, the revised text of a lecture by Leonard Bell, offers a thoughtful reading of works by two artists, photographer Marti Friedlander and painter Douglas MacDiarmid, each of whom have occupied positions as outsiders, one as a migrant to New Zealand, the other an expatriate, treating this as an occasion to explore concepts of home and belonging. Bell's lecture was delivered on 6 December 2006 at the City Gallery in Wellington. It is the fifth in Victoria University's Art History Lecture Series, and the fourth to be delivered as the Gordon H. Brown Lecture.